Mini DV to HDD

[kishshah]

Hi, There's quite a few forums around the web, covering this topic quite a lot. And I have tried researching some answers, but struggled to find one conclusive answer as to whats best. Maybe there isn't one set way of doing things, but I'm hoping someone here can suggest something for me

Basically we have a Mini-DV camcorder, quite dated now but was pretty good at the time. Over time we've built up some 50-80 mini dv tapes, and so far we've simply enjoyed playback by connecting the camcorder to the TV. Quality is fairly reasonable, doesnt quite compare to HD Blurays but we're more than happy with it :P

What we now want to do is capture all the tapes to HDD so that we can continue to watch the tapes even if the camcorder decides to die.

Maintaining quality is important. However file size is also a consideration as there will be many tapes to do. Understandably both trade off against each other. But basically what I'm asking is whats the best compromise? And whats the best software to use to achieve this ... also we're not interested in burning to dvd. Simply files on a HDD will do. Then they will be played back by the HTPC to the HD tv (in case this helps any compression/encode choices)

Hopefully someone can help
Thanks,
Kish

[hech54]

A firewire cable and an enormous 1TB hard drive would be a great start.

[PuzZLeR]

Yes, a firewire cable will work, but make sure you have a firewire port on your PC (but you can get one).

But I will recommend a 2TB drive since they're now widely available.

You will need to capture to DV format for great results - this is roughly 13GB/hr, and with up to 80 tapes, even at 90 minutes each or so, a 2TB will cover it.

Good capture software is WinDV - small, easy, no installation and free.

If you wish to edit, this DV format works well with many consumer editors - if you cut some unwanted stuff you'll have even more space for other stuff too.

If you're really hurting for space, and 13GB/hr is excessive, a good compromise (high quality vs file size) would be high-bitrate MPEG-2, which is roughly 25%-33% the size. But that would be another method entirely.

[kishshah]

Thanks for the replies,

Ok so I already have a 1Tb hard drive and firewire cable to get me started, 2Tb hard drives aren't ridiculously expensive so thats a good option too. 13Gb per hour does sound excessive though, but I'm assuming this will ensure the best quality?? I'll give that WinDV software a go too, thanks. Are there any better capture softwares that anyone would recommend?

Also, could you describe the high bitrate mpeg 2 method to me, so I can try that too and compare how they go? Not planning on doing much editing as theres just so many tapes to get through. But simple splitting of files by scene detection would be nice

Thanks,

[Croco]

Thanks for the replies,

Ok so I already have a 1Tb hard drive and firewire cable to get me started, 2Tb hard drives aren't ridiculously expensive so thats a good option too. 13Gb per hour does sound excessive though, but I'm assuming this will ensure the best quality?? I'll give that WinDV software a go too, thanks. Are there any better capture softwares that anyone would recommend?

Also, could you describe the high bitrate mpeg 2 method to me, so I can try that too and compare how they go? Not planning on doing much editing as theres just so many tapes to get through. But simple splitting of files by scene detection would be nice

Thanks,

When I first started working with DV (Canon GL2 + Canopus DV Raptor) a big hard drive was 80-120GB. When you did a project you pretty much had to devote the entire disk to just a couple of tapes. Let alone processing power at the time doing any rendering out was about 1/3rd realtime. Now with 2TB drives being just under $100 you can hold more hours of DV than total GB in drives 8 years ago. Just to give some perspective there

DV capture is still DV, its in the digital domain the entire time and there is no recompression. WinDV will do just fine despite its age, and it is a mature format and very editable. I'm capturing all my VHS to DV because of this. If you get dropped frames your heads might be getting dirty or cant read the tape right or something is *really* wrong, as such a task is trivial by several magnitudes for modern PCs.

MPEG-2 is an option, however I'm not really satisfied personally with the resulting files from say a Hauppauge card. Composite video is a no-no IMHO (at least on the newer ones with its weird comb filter and muddy de-noise) but S-Video can be acceptable if you have a *very* clean source say the playback from a DV cam. Any significant noise like from VHS just creates blocky MPEG-2 at a standard DVD bitrate. Oh, and if you plan on editing those files you'll need a editor that can do such a thing without recompressing, and you can only edit on I-frames as such.

TL;DR: 13GB/hr is trivial with modern hard drive costs and space. Just get another big drive and burn conversions to MPEG-2 to DVD, or even just put the DV .avi files on blu-ray if you have one. I hope your camcorder will survive playing that many tapes though without the heads starting to get dirty.

[PuzZLeR]

Ok so I already have a 1Tb hard drive and firewire cable to get me started, 2Tb hard drives aren't ridiculously expensive so thats a good option too.

If shopping for another, a 2TB drive would be worth it as it would be cheaper per GB if you want something solely for this project.

13Gb per hour does sound excessive though, but I'm assuming this will ensure the best quality??

Pretty much, yes. You can try uncompressed/lossless, for maybe a teeny bit more quality, but the file size will multiply. DV is good enough for Mini DV tape.

I'll give that WinDV software a go too, thanks. Are there any better capture softwares that anyone would recommend?

DV is a fixed format, so you will get what you will get from any app. However, you can look into others, like WMM, NeroVision, most editors (ex:Vegas or VideoStudio), etc, or any other someone else may recommend. But for something free, that produces output virtually exactly like any other Firewire/DV capture app, WinDV should be all you need. You can always use this output in any editor, or encoder, thereafter.

Also, could you describe the high bitrate mpeg 2 method to me, so I can try that too and compare how they go?

You can encode any DV file directly to MPEG-2 with a good encoder (such as CCE, or HC Enc) to save space, BUT, this is not recommended for best results. If you want MPEG-2 captures, you'd need to capture directly to it for best quality.

I know that NeroVision and VideoStudio can capture directly to MPEG-2 via firewire, not sure of others. (Unless someone can name another one, or three). Both produce quality comparible to DV in my opinion for much less file size.

You can get decent captures at 6500kbps with MPEG-2, but at over 8000kbps-8500kbps they will look comparible to DV.

Not sure of your camera, but if it has an RCA composite out, or even better - an S-video out - you can capture with another unit like a Hauppauge 250/350 or an ATI Wonder 600 USB to high quality MPEG-2, that is, if you wish to buy other hardware designed for MPEG-2. Both are excellent.

You will have options with the ATI Wonder 600 USB though. When you install its WDM drivers it can then capture to DV and uncompressed/lossless formats as well (such as when using the free tool VirtualDub).

Not planning on doing much editing as theres just so many tapes to get through. But simple splitting of files by scene detection would be nice

VideoStudio can do scene detection, but honestly, such algorithms are proportionally as effective/sensitive to a slowdown in speed IMO. I also don't know of a free app that does this, only professional or consumer editors.

But if you want to manually place cuts on DV you can use VirtualDub, but enable Video->Direct Steam Copy to make sure you don't lose quality.

For any cuts on MPEG-2, you should use a dedicated MPEG editor so you can do it losslessly (except for a few frames near the cuts). I can recommend any of three excellent apps for this: Womble, VideoReDo and TMPGEnc MPEG Editor, but I don't know of a good and easy free one for MPEG-2.

[PuzZLeR]

DV capture is still DV, its in the digital domain the entire time and there is no recompression. WinDV will do just fine despite its age, and it is a mature format and very editable. I'm capturing all my VHS to DV because of this. If you get dropped frames your heads might be getting dirty or cant read the tape right or something is *really* wrong, as such a task is trivial by several magnitudes for modern PCs.

I agree, but although fixed, DV is still, in theory, a compressed format. But for Mini DV, I don't think this is an issue as far as any visual loss of quality is concerned.

MPEG-2 is an option, however I'm not really satisfied personally with the resulting files from say a Hauppauge card.

Hauppauge devices are excellent for reliability, but yeah, I too notice a slight softness no matter what I do, which is why I also recommended an ATI 600.

Composite video is a no-no IMHO (at least on the newer ones with its weird comb filter and muddy de-noise) but S-Video can be acceptable if you have a *very* clean source say the playback from a DV cam.

I personally also too would avoid composite for this.

Any significant noise like from VHS just creates blocky MPEG-2 at a standard DVD bitrate.

This shouldn't be an issue with MiniDV though with a good capture device. VHS is rather crude though, and needs other equipment like a good deck and a TBC.

Oh, and if you plan on editing those files you'll need a editor that can do such a thing without recompressing, and you can only edit on I-frames as such.

Yes MPEG-2 key frames are further apart than DV (which is an intra-frame format) but a dedicated MPEG editor will re-encode those few frames near there on cuts/joins for accuracy and recalculate the GOPs. But you must use appropriate software for this since consumer apps tend to re-encode the whole thing with MPEG-2.

[Croco]

I was probably being a little too critical of the Hauppauge cards. I've simply had mixed experience with the ones I have bought. (I was pretty unhappy with the PVR-500 setting be back about $150 at the time and its 2nd tuner was rubbish, let alone the first one). Don't ask me about the original WinTV PVR (the very first non-Conexant proprietary one) either.

I just took another look at mine and having a better source now it appears acceptable. Using the AVT-8710 procamp helps getting the levels right alot easier. This still does not look so bad.



I remember reading how the PVR-250/350 had a better comb filter for TV/Composite sources, but no idea if they would work on modern systems. I have a 4 year old PVR-150 and even with Win 7 64-bit support you have to limit the available ram with msconfig to 3GB or less, otherwise all of your captures will be garbage. (I do not think the modern cards have this issue, just the earlier Conexant ones like mine)

Perhaps someone with a more modern device from Hauppauge can chime in here. For efficiency they would certainly be a good method if space savings were a concern. WinTVCap took me a while to get used to, and even then it is a bit fiddly. I don't know of any other 3rd party capture programs that let you fiddle with the settings on these cards, as the WinTV app itself is usually rather restrictive about bitrate or procamp settings.

[PuzZLeR]

Perhaps someone with a more modern device from Hauppauge can chime in here. For efficiency they would certainly be a good method if space savings were a concern.

Well, currently I have the Hauppauge 1192 WinTV_HVR-1950, which does have the Conexant chip under the hood.

It's actually quite good, and a very reliable MPEG-2 workhorse and doesn't hog the PC resources when a capture app is in Standby. However the video is a bit soft with a some lost details.

The ATI Wonder 600 has a more crisp MPEG-2 output, more detail for sure, but has more artifacts such as more blocks, edge artifacts and the like. It also uses more system resources since it's not hardware based like the 1950.

Which to pick? It's subjective.

Let me capture some comparison shots and I will report back to this thread.

[PuzZLeR]

Ok, here are some TV captures from a recurring station that previews the same advertising segment every 10 minutes or so. This is an ad for the current Hawaii 5-0 TV series - no copyright infringement is intended. It is only a random pick for demonstration purposes.

I have used MPEG-2 with the Hauppauge 1950 and the ATI Wonder 600 at roughly the same bitrate, which was about 8200kbps. The DV was captured with VirtualDub via the ATI Wonder 600. Although not conclusive, it should give an idea.

Hauppauge 1950 MPEG-2:


ATI Wonder 600 MPEG-2:


ATI Wonder 600 DV:


The Hauppauge capture clearly is softest.

The ATI's MPEG-2 has similar detail to the DV, and noticeably more than the softer Hauppauge capture, but with movement has a few more blocks than the other two. However it does have more details per bitrate than the other two.

The DV is arguably the nicer capture in both ways, combining the best of both MPEG-2 captures - detail and less artifacts. However it's several multiples in file size.

[PuzZLeR]

I should point out that I do not have a MiniDV camera in my possession at the moment, so I used analog TV captures for the sake of hypothetical discussion.

All have been captured to BPM files and saved to JPG, but the DV version needed a width adjustment of 0.88x to compensate for the different PAR value.

[Croco]

I don't intend to threadjack, but what capture program are you using for your TV Wonder 600 by the way, for both MPEG-2 and DV? The one I just picked up I noticed it had the AGC problem, unless I'm using the wrong drivers.

[PuzZLeR]

Before anything, you have to load the WDM drivers for the ATI Wonder 600, this makes it more "universal" with software, such as capturing to AVI formats with VirtualDUB and other MPEG software or PVR software. The Hauppauge only does MPEG-2 but is generally accepted by other software (but I've heard of "hacks" with Hauppauge for other video formats but I have no clue how they work).

Having said that, you should have fluid compatibility with the ATI 600 with several platforms.

In this case, for DV, I simply used the ATI 600 with VirtualDub. As you know, DV is DV with pretty much any software.

For the MPEG-2 in this example, I used SageTV for, both, the ATI and Hauppauge. I would get similar results with other software, such as with Beyond TV or the software that comes with the capture hardware, such as Catalyst for the ATI or WinTV for the Hauppauge.

How are you getting the problem? Which hardware are you referring to and which software?

[Croco]

I have a "Diamond ATI TV Wonder HD 600" PCI Express card. I was using the drivers here http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/tvtuner_win7.aspx When I tried to capture video in Virtualdub to DV I have ffdshow hooked up for the preview window with Avisynth histogram() for showing levels, the AGC was obvious and all over the place compared to say the ADVC110 or the other cards I've tried.

I see about SageTV. Obviously Virtualdub cannot do MPEG-2 so I was curious about that.

[PuzZLeR]

Those are indeed the WDM drivers I mentioned. But I run an XP capture box, not Win 7, so I installed only the XP ones.

And my 600 is the USB version, so I'm not certain if the PCI version runs the same way.

But, according to one source, the Vista drivers work fine for Win 7 since at the time ATI/AMD decided to stop supporting older models like the 600, so this may be an issue.

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/tvtuner_vista.aspx

PS: There have been other models since the 600 but newer in this case is not better. A perfect example is the 750 - horrid product IMO.

[kishshah]

WOW. Thanks guys for all the replies! More than helpful! A 2tb hard drive has been ordered, and most likely will be just keep the 13gb avi files directly from the WinDV seeing as the quality will be best and size shouldnt be an issue .. when it comes to backing up the drives that will be another issue .. but I'll get to that another day :P

Thanks again for all the help!
I'd like to say i'm looking forward to going through all these tapes, but the thought of it is slightly off putting .. job needs doing though ...

[PuzZLeR]

WOW. Thanks guys for all the replies! More than helpful! A 2tb hard drive has been ordered, and most likely will be just keep the 13gb avi files directly from the WinDV seeing as the quality will be best and size shouldnt be an issue .. when it comes to backing up the drives that will be another issue .. but I'll get to that another day :P

I use high-bitrate MPEG-2 for a majority of my VHS and TV captures, but for that special, and personal, content I use bigger formats. I would agree that the DV solution is best for you IMO since I assume your content is in that category and irreplaceable. And storage place is growing anyway, and isn't going to be an issue if you plan to keep this stuff long-term. When you think about it, one external HDD that can hold all your tapes' content is not much bigger in physical size than one tape anyway.

As for a backup, keep your tapes, at least for now, until you "get to that another day".

I'd like to say i'm looking forward to going through all these tapes, but the thought of it is slightly off putting .. job needs doing though ...

Honestly, you have to have some fun and enjoyment doing this because it will be time consuming and overwhelming otherwise, especially if you decide to do any edits.

I personally look forward to a new tape project now.

[edDV]

The argument for capturing MiniDV to DV format is the resulting file is bit for bit identical to the data on tape. It is an exact first generation duplicate and makes an ideal archive. The only counter-argument is file size but that excuse has disappeared with cheap hard drive cost.

Home hand held camcorder video is a worse case for quality compression. Home video is naturally shaky in motion and noisy. A compressed archive will be far inferior in quality to the camcorder original file. Also, the target compressed format will vary by device and over time. DVD needs MPeg2. IPods mp4, Youtube uploads progressive h.264. In each case, best compression results will be from DV original source. This will also be true for future formats and devices.

I archive DV as DV but also make an MPeg2 DVD spec (720x480i/29.97 , lower field first, 9200Kbps video 224 Kbps AC3 audio) for players and DVD copies.

[2Bdecided]

13Gb per hour does sound excessive though, but I'm assuming this will ensure the best quality??

Pretty much, yes. You can try uncompressed/lossless, for maybe a teeny bit more quality

No you can't. The original is DV. Converting it to lossless can, at best, give you the exact same video in a far larger file size. But amateures will probably mess up the conversion by switching colour space along the way, so reducing quality.

I agree with edDV - encoding DV to MPEG-2 for archive is a waste of effort, reduces quality, and doesn't save much in terms of cost these days.

If you don't care, so right ahead - but if you do care, keep the DV-AVI files as your masters. (and the tapes themselves, for that matter - another backup is always handy, and it's just possible you find a glitch on an important moment of footage and want to try to re-capture it).

Cheers,
David.

[PuzZLeR]

Hi, I never said high bitrate MPEG-2 was a great option for this, only if hurting for hard drive space, and only got into it on request. And the discussion did get into VHS/TV capture somewhat, which made MPEG-2 more viable then.

Oh, I agree, DV is the ultimate solution for this source, which is MiniDV.

As for lossless, I've said "maybe" since I had a hunch it may not produce more quality with this source (didn't have a MiniDV to test this on). I agree that MiniDV -> DV is a different capture scheme than TV/VHS where a lossless format does indeed produce a bit of a difference.