Archiving home clips: MPEG-2 or AVI?

[uncle_bent]

I have read extensively on this site and others so I have some good information (thank you very much to those of you who have contributed to this great site), and yet I’m having trouble making a final decision.

I’m wanting to digitize my home video, as so many others here are doing. What I have is a huge mish-mash of clips averaging 2 to 15 minutes that span around 15 8mm tapes spanning several years. These are just around-the-house type things of my son and various little family moments. I’d eventually like to make some compilation DVDs that are watchable without boring people to death.

Here is what I want to do. I would like to capture a tape at a time. After capturing a tape I want to break it up into individual clips that can be used to later build DVDs with a theme (e.g. baby’s first year, etc...). I don’t anticipate doing much editing other than sometimes clipping excess footage off of individual clips and indexing the individual scenes, maybe inserting a text frame here and there. Sort of a cut and paste kind of thing, if you get my drift. The main thing right now is to archive the footage on DVD so it is in a non-deteriorating form in discreet clips that can be mixed and matched for DVD authoring projects later on.

Finally I get to the question. Should I capture these clips as AVI or just encode them as MPEG-2 from the get-go? It would take far, far more media if I kept them as AVIs, but I understand from my reading here that AVI is suited for editing, while MPEG is not. On the other hand, given the limited editing I intend to do, would MPEG work as well? I have experimented with both types of capture and I seem to be able to do it without a hitch on my current setup. The resulting video is really pretty good (thank you Lordsmurf).

My 2nd question is: What software would you use to break up the large capture into discreet clips, depending on whether I store them as AVI or MPEG? I would be very grateful for any advice or suggestions.

[bugster]

The best process for quality and flexibility

Capture as Avi.
Edit as Avi,
Encode to mpeg-2 (high bitrate)
Author
Burn

[BSR]

uncle_bent.
I had the same dilema deciding how to save the captures for Editing down the road and to prevent any more deteriorating from my VHS tapes. Might not apply in your case, but I use a Digital Camcorder to capture and save the footage to a miniDV tape 13Gig=1hour or 1.5hour depending on setting.
If you don't have a DV camcorder or don't want to waste all those DVD media with AVI's, then save as Mpeg but at a very high bitrate to keep as much quality as possible for later editing. You can still work with MPEG, but it's usually slower.
To break up the large files, I use Virtualdub which is free, and click Direct Stream Copy under Video Processing.

Scott

[c10250]

I am in the process of archiving all of my home videos. I am actually converting very good quality HI-8 tapes to digital. After much research on the topic I have decided to do the following (some may think it's overkill):

1. Capture in AVI using the Huffy encoder, with the best quality settings. This results in a HUGE file (sometimes 90 Gig), since I can easily capture 2 hours at a time.

2. Edit the captured file, and convert the "clips" to MPEG-2 using a very high bit rate (9000) and a good encoder.

3. Delete the .avi files.

Now, I wind up with superb MPEGs, but the problem is that they can be quite large as MPEGs go. Currently not a whole lot will fit on a DVD. This doesn't really bother me though since my main goal is to preserve the videos. I keep all of them preserved on my computer (REMEMBER TO BACKUP!!). I figure that in a couple of years, the DVD burners will be dual-layer anyway, and this issue will not be as big as it is now. At least I have my videos stored in a very good quality MPEG format. Hopefully, in the not-to-distant future, I will be able to place hours of these MPEGs on a single media.

[Leoslocks]

2. Edit the captured file, and convert the "clips" to MPEG-2 using a very high bit rate (9000) and a good encoder.

I hope to accomplish the same to some old Svhs tapes.

What are you using as a good encoder?

[lordsmurf]

High bitrate I-frame only MPEG2 for later editing.

[FOO]

I'll tell you what I did about that which worked OK. I had hours of home
video of 8mm film transfered to DV. I didn't want to make the final DVD
immediately because I didn't have a brilliant plan yet..
I opened the DV with Vdub and frameserved each individual clip
to TMPGenc one at a time and ended up with billions of MPEG2 clips.
They were encoded at the final desired DVD bitrate so I would not have
to encode again. I saved those to DVD RW as data for backup.

Much later I just plopped them down in an Authoring program in the
desired order. The advantage is that it's stored in the final compression
and can still be "edited" sort of.

[rotaflex]

I opened the DV with Vdub and frameserved each individual clip
to TMPGenc one at a time and ended up with billions of MPEG2 clips.
They were encoded at the final desired DVD bitrate so I would not have
to encode again. I saved those to DVD RW as data for backup.

FOO, I think you just described a process that would be most benefitial to a lot of us. At least for a newbie like me.

Any chance you can provide some step by step? For example, how to you even frame serve from VirtualDub to TMPGENC? I have a bunch of 8mm trying to capture to MPEG2 if possible. According to your experience,what bit rate would you recommend?

Thanks in advance. Looking forward to your posting.

[FOO]

https://www.videohelp.com/virtualdubframeserve.htm

I cant remember the bitrate . experiment.

This takes a while. Open video in vdub, select a clip with mark-in mark out
start frameserver , open VDR in tmpgenc and hit start .

when it's done , stop frameserver, pick a new clip and go again.

[rotaflex]

FOO, thanks.

Do you think this will work with Scenalyzer ->TMPGENC? In this way, it automatically creates MPEG2 files with the different scenes?

Just a thought, I'm new.

[Thorn]

Adding to what Foo and Lordsmurf said:
I typically encode my home video clips at a high rate as dvd-ready mpeg2 and encode the audio too. I then have "assets" (as media production houses call them) that I can author to DVD at a later time. If you want to edit these clips, but know where you'll edit, just save as chapters (now you have hundreds of assets!). If I have different edits, I save both versions so I don't have to redo work later. Home clips are usually short for me, so I don't worry about size.

If you want to edit at unknown points, encoding a version to I-frame only means you have the best resolution (you can only cut at I-frames if you don't want to re-encode, so not using I-frame only mean you might have a few extra frames that you wanted to cut off). Womble edit is all the rave now for editing mpeg2 (but I haven't tried it). However, you loose some quality by going I-frame only. See if you can notice it.

If you just want to add a text screen to the beginning of the clip or each chapter, you don't even need to edit. Good authoring software lets you put the title clip right before the video.