Big Job [Need Advice]

[gte024h]

I have a problem... I have 62 VHS casettes each with about 4 hours of video, and I need to capture them all. The problem is worse though... they are all old, very old. Most of them were recorded around 1984-6 off broadcast TV. Then dubbed (i.e. they are 2nd generation copies). If that isn't bad enough, they were salvaged out of my old burnt out apartment about a month ago (yeah my neighbors were morons, grilling on the patio). So not only are they old, but now they are water logged and smoked. They've been drying and I have tested a few, and they seem to play ok, but with bad spots occassionally.

Anyways, I want to archive these tapes digitally before it's too late and I would like some opinions about the best way to do it. I have 3 Athlon XP 2000+ machines I can use, two with 80gb drives and one with a 160gb RAID-0. Two of the machines (one 80gb and one 160gb) also have AIW Radeons, and they are all hooked up together on a 100bT switch. I also have two VCR's I can use.

I have done a test run with one of tapes as follows:

Use VirtualDub to capture at 640x480 (NTSC) to HuffYUV.
Use Smart Deinterlace filter while cropping 8 pixels off the bottom (head switching noise).
Use fxVHS filter (God it takes forever!).
Then do two pass DivX at about 1000kbit/s with 192kbit/s audio, so as to fit a 2.25 hour episode on 2 CD's.

On just one of the Athlon XP 2000+ systems that process took about 24 hours (nonstop) for 2 hours of content. That was for one episode, I have 103 episodes to capture.

Here are a few questions:

Considering the source, do I really need to DivX these, or should I just use (S)VCD?
Considering the source, should I condsider capturing at a lower resolution, regardless of how I encode them?
For DivX at 640x480, what bit rates are acceptable (for VHS quality)? Would there be much difference between 2 CD's at 1000kb/s or 1 CD at 500kb/s?
What storage procedures can I use to minimize the tape degredation while they are waiting to be ripped?
What settings can I use to speed up fxVHS? (I get about 3fps right now)
In the future, set top boxes will probably be able to play MPEG4. If I rip to DivX, is it likely that I will need to reencode (not just reburn) them to make them compatible?
The DivX codec settings mention .mp4 format. How does that work? Should I use it? (I know... RTFM)
Is it posible to put a (S)VCD stream on a DVD-R and have a set top DVD player play it properly? (just so I can fit more episodes per disc)
Are there filters that I can use (realtime or otherwise) to equalize the audio? (the treble is lacking on these tapes)
Would a dual processor setup make much difference? (I am thinking dual Athlon XP 2000+)

Thanks for any advice you guys can give. This is a pretty big project for me, considering that I have a job and am a full time student as well. Advice on what I can do to increase my efficiency or reduce processing time is really appreciated.

BTW: The tapes are of old Dr. Who episodes (I have 103 out of 157). Plus a few Blake 7 episodes.

[stormcrow]

My first suggestion would be to go with VCD rather than DIVX for a couple reasons. First, capturing at a vertical resolution of 480 you get to skip the deinterlacing step because the vcd will not have interlacing artifacts from chopping out half the fields. This will save some of your data rate for where you need it more because you wont have artifacts from the deinterlacing (and it sounds like you need as much as you can get with the source) Second, the VCD bitrate will actually be a little higher than your 1000 divx, and you should still be able to fit 2.25 hours across two vcds. Third, VCD quality is very comparable to VHS, although the bad source will make this not quite as true as with good source. And fourth, with the VCD resolution you simply get more bits per pixel.

I would still capture at as high resolution as you can, but perhaps 704x480 to make the resize faster if you encode to VCD.

An vcd stream is compatible with the dvd specifications and most set top dvd players will play dvd-r's with vcd, however, svcd is not compliant but still will work with some dvd players.

Divx may become set top compatible, but vcd/svcd already is very widespread, and you dont have to worry about those swtandards changing down the line.

A dual proc system definitely speeds the process up, especially if the software supports multithreading, such as tmpgenc, but running dual xp's requires modifying the processors and is a very delicate and possibly harmful process, but it is possible.

Hope this helps some

[lusid]

For the TV episodes, coming from old VHS tapes, I'd target VCD format.

The fxVHS filter is slow, and theres not a lot you can do to speed it up.

There are a couple things you can try, but you'll have to experiment to find a balance between performance and quality.

Depending on just how bad the source material is, you may be able to do a lot of the cleanup during capture. In virtualdub, set your capture res to 352x480, and enable the virtical reduction. this does a simple blend dinterlace as it cuts the resultion down to 352x240 (vcd res) and smooths out some of the minor noise in the process. You can also enable the noise reduction during capture, which will soften the image a bit but take out more noise. It is adjustable, so experiment. It may get it close enough that you can use smart smoother to get a good result. It's much faster the fxvhs.

Even if it is bad enough that you really need the temporal filter, doing these things during capture should let you pull back on the settings in fxVHS and speed things up.

Also, for the pixels you need to crop out, I'd suggest cropping them, then leterboxing the image back to full size, instead of resizing the image to fill the frame. It's much faster, and the cropped scanlines are usually not visible anyway on a TV. They end up in the overscan region on most sets. You can crop during capture, and letterbox it when you frameserve it out.

Going to a dualCPU system will really only speed up the encoding process (and only with tmpgenc). It wont have a significant impact on the speed of the virtualdub filters. However, I have found that I can capture and encode at the same time on my dual processor system. That is, I can capture one video, while tmpgenc is processing another. I'm doing simple 352x240 captures in avi_io and the capture process takes about 6-8% of the cpus.

On the other hand, you time may be better spent earning the $$ you'll need to buy the DVDs as they get released.

[BKL]

You might check out using Video Deluxe from Magix. I haven't used it, but it is supposed to have a capability for cleaning up old VHS recordings. I think Maximum PC gave it a favorable review a few months ago. I, too, have alot of old Doctor Who recordings I hope to get around to digitizing. Good Luck!