lossless capture!!!

[zoranb]

Ok heres what ive got and what i wanna do. I have a VHS vcr with anologue output, i have a sony camcorder TRV 325E, a laptop and a desktop pc both wth USB2 and firewire cards on. And i want to record my VHS and D8 tapes on DVD all that in max quality.
I dont get the part of the compression on the captured video. Now, if done throught the camcorder isnt it right that i will get a compressed video? And from what i know thats editable but ill loose in quality due to the fact that ill have to recompress it again after edit! Is there a way of capturing that video via the camcorder without compression?
I have a hunch that this uncompressed capture might be possible only by using a capture card through my VHS vcr and not through the D8 camcorder! Am i right?
Plz recommend me any other way to do the best lossless capture (out of my VHS tapes) i can with my stuff!

p.s.
how come theres no guide from top to bottom using just Adobe Premiere for a capture matter way up to dvd authoring? Is anything missing that the app cant do? Isnt it a all in one application for sutch a matter?

[overloaded_ide]

DVD IS a loss compresion itself!
DVDs are .vob files for the movie. To get a VOB you start with a DVD compliant mpeg2. MPG is a loss compresion
So there is therefor no way to get a DVD without loss.
One could say it is a losing battle

If you go from VCR to Digital camcorder to PC you end up without loss I think. The camcorder converts the analog to digital and the PC stores it as a raw AVI I beleave. Then eventually you convert that AVI to Mpeg2 then to .vob.

I tried that but had problems with the Avi files not having sound and have not found the problem yet. For the most part I just capture directly onto the PC in mpeg2. It works well for me, but I don't have alot of editing to do either.

[zoranb]

Well actually i believe there is no sutch thing as "lossless" in general in our world, but i mean to have the less loss possible and high quality in order to make out of what i have (VHS & D8 tapes) a DVD!
Thanx for the contribution and still im all ears!

[pijetro]

You seem to have a fixation with losing quality on your video due to compression. With the right setup, you'll have up to the same quality as the original VHS..

DV is a very loose compression, so don't worry 'bout quality loss. Your bigger concern should be the conditions of the tape, cable, camera and VCR.

As far as editing goes, the only recompression that happens is at the edited portions. Your whole video doesn't get recompressed, just the transitions. When you output for DVD, your file gets further compressed, but at this point, quality is determined by bitrate...

Generally, as far as capturing goes, there's two main codecs used. They are Huffy, and DV (depending on your setup). Give it a try first, and get back with your answer..

[Gazorgan]

Don't even ponder RAW video, you don't have the HD space, and USB 2.0 isn't fast enough.

Huffyuv is a lossless codec. Depending on your resolution, your capturing at 20-40 GB/hour. MJPEG is 'virtually lossless' compared to MPEG2/4 codecs, and you'll run 10-25 GB/hour.

Forget about VHA, Garbage in Gabage out. VHS has a lower resolution than DVD, so you can never goet 'DVD Quality'. I wodn't do VHS higher than 1/2 D1 resolution.

D8 can be pretty high quality, on par with DVD. Just capture it and edit in native format. If you don't ahve space, then capute it in Huffyuv or MJPEG. If you don't have space for that, then your hosed. Drop all references to quality and proceed with some more lossy codec.

Adobe Premiere has a very steep learning curve. There is no 'guide' for it because it doesn't just do one thing. You could spend days on it and still not produce anything more than a DVD of your tape. You could also produce something that looks like a Primetime Network piece.

Read the tutorials that came with the Adobe CD's.