silk purse from a sows ear !

[holistic]

A simple answer is sort from a difficult question


HISTORY :
I have 30+ hours of VHS (ntsc) and about 10 hours of Hi8 i wish to 'protect' from the ravages of time.
In order to do this i got an analog capure card a while ago and started doing captures at 352*480 . My machine is just able to achieve the 23 (or so) Mb/sec write speeds with no frame loss but the task is very time consuming.

THE QUESTION :
I have been considering the Hollywood DV Bridge, because it appears to be able to take an analog input the convert it to 'DV' for real time export to another DV cam or to the computer through the firewire (1394).


1.Even though VHS is about 270 line of res and Hi8 approx 400 will it be 'upsampled' to DV's 500 lines of res?
2.My earlier analog attempts were encoded to MPEG1 @ a bitrate of approx 2300+ - Should i now use MPEG2 at 4000+ since the final output will be to DVD?
3.Are the other devices that can do this on the market ? (i looked at the INSTANT DVD but it does mpeg2 not DV export)
4.Has anyone had any problems with this device. ?

T.I.A

[lattedfw]

Holistic,

I have a Sony analog->DV converter. It also can go DV->analog. I have mostly done conversions of old VHS and 8mm home videos to VCD and now DVD-R. I have an analog capture card as well, but I never use it for home video conversions. My analog card is in an older P2-266. The DV firewire card is in a P4 1.7GHz machine. I've never know the P4 to drop any data streaming in on the firewire connection, even in 2-hour-long continuous captures. I've also got an iMac and have done some captures and editing with iMovie.

You won't get better quality than is originally present in your tapes. But with DV, you won't notice any degradation in going from analog to digital, especially with home video-quality recordings. I can't say whether it is truly upsampled or not (nothing is added, but there could be some sort of interpolation inherent to DV compression- beyond my realm of knowledge).

I've converted 15 year-old VHS tapes that were dubbed at EP speed from VHS-C to standard grade VHS. The original quality is mediocre, but the DV captures look the same (no worse, no better).

Going to VCD (MPEG1) dropped the quality, since the video loses its interlace and what remains is basically half the original image. I've had others comment that the VCD video has a film quality, which could have some artistic merits. Going to DVD (MPEG2) has let me keep the full original video (both fields at full 740x480 resolution). I'll be converting all my old home movies and videos again.

[lattedfw]

Holistic,

I re-read your question and thought of more to add.

Seems like you've been down the VCD road. For DVD-R containing home video captured via DV/firewire, I have used TMPGenc using 2-pass VBR with a minimum rate of 2000 and maximum of 5500. In my longest capture of 1 hour 45 minutes, this netted a DV file of 29GB and an MPEG2 file of about 3 GB (MPEG2 file will vary depending on motion and complexity of images in the source file). It took 30 hours with TMPGenc on my 1.7GHz Dell Pentium-4, Windows 2000, running nothing else. I specified highest quality in addition to 2-pass VBR. The result was amazing- I could not tell it was not original video. I'll be more daring and increase the upper-end bitrate in subsequent conversions.

[holistic]

lattedfw,

Thanks for the reply.(s)

"I have a Sony analog->DV converter"
Are all A/D converters the same or are some better than others - ie the DV Bridge or say a new MiniDV cam with A/D ports?

"I've never know the P4 to drop any data streaming in on the firewire connection......"
I doubt if it would since the drive is the main player in the data thru-put and not the CPU ! - but tx for the feedback

"You won't get better quality than is originally present in your tapes"
That much i know (hence the subject title) BUT ,and i did forget to ask , does the analog to DV converstion result in a 720*480 frame.
If it does how does the 270 lines analog of res "convert" to 500 lines of DV ?


Another thought relating to A/D converters - has anyone had any audio sync problems? Should i rent a T.B.C for my older tapes so i get a better conversion?

tx

[lattedfw]

Holistic,

The DV capture results in a 720x480 frame, no matter what quality the input is. The only thing I can change on my Sony converter is 12 or 16-bit audio. I can't hear the difference on a home video, but I still use 16-bit because the audio will be going through compression later and I want to start with the best resolution to begin with.