DVD Recorder vs PC Capture

[Saltydog]

What are the pros and cons of using a DVD Recorder vice PC for capture. Or vice versa. It seems that you'd have more quality control with the PC-Capture Card route, but at a much greater investment in time. I'm looking at converting all my old VHS tapes of family events, not archiving movies so I'm thinking that the possible QA gain may not be noticeable. I've spent months learning about the 'how's', have even bought an AverMedia Studio card and downloaded a bunch of recommended softwares... but now I'm thinking 'let the black box do the capture' and I'll do the edit and burn? Any comments would be welcomed... besides telling me that I'm sitting on my head! SD ps. There's not a ton of info out there on how well Recorders work either.

[fscrocco]

I've tried both. I recommend a standalone dvd recorder. I started out with a Matrox capture card before standalones were available. The disadvantages are: you have to have a fast computer and fast hard drive. You should have a dedicated HD for capturing so the swap file is not on the same drive. No matter what, you will probably have dropped frames. A hardware capture card is better, but expensive. Then you have to transcode to mpg2. This ties your computer up for hours. The advantages of a standalone are: It uses real-time hardware encoder. The quality is outstanding. Most recorders like the Panasonics and Toshiba have a built in time base corrector, a 3D Y/C comb filter and 3D video digital noise reduction (DNR). This makes your recording look better than the original VHS. Alot of the models have a built in hard drive to store many hours of recording, but it also lets it act like a tivo, where you can pause live recordings or go back to watch the beginning while it continues to record. In the end, you will spend less than on a good capture card and fast hard drives.
I record to ram, bring it into my computer via a $40 toshiba model 1712 cd/dvd player, change the extension to mpg, author with UleadDVD Workshop or Tmpgenc DVD Author and burn. I've also edited first with Ulead Media Studio Pro. I would never go back to capture cards.

[ZippyP.]

Unless you really want to have full control over your captures, and have alot of spare time, then I would go the "black box" route. I find the quality from the Panasonic that I used to be great. I used Womble Mpeg Video Wizard to edit the files copied from the DVD-R or DVD Ram disks.

[FulciLives]

I use a computer capture card. This gives me a lot of control over the capture.

I like this method becaues I capture AVI format using very little compression and then I encode to MPEG-2.

Before I encode to MPEG-2 it is very easy to edit the capture. Also I can apply filters to the capture to clean up the video. I also normalize the audio as well.

It creates super results but does take a lot of time. I think it is well suited for "hard case" videos such as videotape captures. Also if the program is very long you can do a multi-pass VBR MPEG encode which is always a good idea and hard to really do effectively in real-time.

However the new JVC stand alone DVD recorder is looking damn impressive.

I've seen some screen grabs taken from VHS and LD and they just blow me away!

Simply amazing machine that JVC is ... once they come out with a model that has a built-in HDD I might just have to purchase one.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[yoda313]

Hello,
I'd recomend a pc capture card. The advantage being that you don't have to buy media for each recording. If you do a bad recording, simply delete the file (or use an editor to clean it up). It also gives you a ton of encoding options like divx, mpg, etc... This also gives you output flexibility, cdr for vcd or divx (and dvdr for mpg2) and so on. It doesn't take too much editing time to get it to disc (I have an amd 850 and a wintv pvr250 and I do realtime mpg2 capture, editing is a little slow but burnings ok).
Bottom line if you want flexibility go with a pc card, if you want ease of use go with a set top box (getting to be more and more like the trusty old vcr ). Happy hunting!
Kevin

[ZippyP.]

I'd recomend a pc capture card. The advantage being that you don't have to buy media for each recording.

If you use RW or DVD Ram then you can re-use the disks, so no real advantage there.

[yoda313]

Hello,
Zippy P is right about the rewritable discs, I forgot about that. But if you wanted to keep what was on them for a little while you'd still need extra discs. With the pc card as long as you have hard disk space you can dub whenever you want. A nice feature to have if your low on discs or its a holiday and stores are closed . Anyway, just a few points from experienced users for you to make a choice on a conversion method. Enjoy.
Kevin

[Capmaster]

I think quality-wise a standalone will be overkill for VHS transfers. More than adequate. In fact, the current crop of standalones no longer give up much to PC capture in the quality department. They do a very nice job. My Panasonic standalone does a much better job of macro block control than my PC setup.

I think the deciding factor should be in how much editing you plan to do. Heavy editing and combining and you'll want a PC setup. Straight transfer and mild editing or just simple menus and a standalone should work nicely

[lordsmurf]

A DVD recorder pretty much require higher-quality sources. It has less options. Many of them do a poor job (Panasonic, Cyberhome, etc) and others are pretty nice (JVC, LiteON), so do your research first. They're just now coming into their own. You have less features, no control over menu style, etc. This is a VCR replacement.

A PC capture card allows full control. Granted, you must have a good PC and a handful of software, but this is the only way to create that truly professional-looking DVD. A PC capture card can often deal with much poorer sources, and you can use capture methods and software to restore the video and audio to a quality better than the source (if you know what you're doing). This is really the only way to properly edit video.

You can also mix these methods, using the DVD recorder as the capture device for good quality source. Then import to PC and re-author the disc. It is almost impossible to edit video from a recorder, aside from simple things like cutting out commercials.

I use all three of these scenarios.

For heavy editing, you MUST use the AVI capture format with PC methods. For simple conversion, you can get by on the recorder method. MPEG is a final format. AVI is a working format. A DVD recorder only does MPEG. It also uses AC3 audio, which is a final audio format. You really need raw WAV/AIFF for editing audio. AC3-compressed noise never really goes away

Decide what you want to do, then buy accordingly. That's my best advice.

[gshelley61]

I've also been down the PC capture, edit, filter, frameserve, encode, author and burn route for the past year or so. Lots of options and control, but very time consuming. Plus, for all of the time invested, sometimes the resulting DVD doesn't always look that great.

So, I got hold of a used Panasonic DVD recorder and that changed everything. Encoding MPEG2 in real time to re-writeable DVD's is so much faster and easier... there are good MPEG2 cutters, joiners and editors out there to create and author your final DVD without any quality loss, too.

I recently stepped up and bought the new JVC recorder (DR-M10SL) and it is a top notch performer. It has a mild built-in TBC, DNR video noise reduction and a digital color/contrast controller that work prior to encoding. The results are very good and the effort is minimal. I can't stress enough how much time this method saves. For archiving family video or transferring VHS or laserdisc to DVD, I think this is the way to go.

The DVD Recorder forum is here:

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=28


Also, if you visit page 5 of this JVC DR-M10SL thread, you can see the screen grabs I posted that FulciLives mentioned earlier:

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=222312

[Heavensent]

the best qulity you can get is with a pc and a capture card.
i've tried a few standalone recorders, they are nice and can make the job
eazy, but i can get better qulity with a capture card.
if you are looking for the eazy way- go ahead and buy a standalone.
if you are looking for a realy good capture- use the pc.

you CAN see the outpt is just not the same, it comes very close - but not the same.

[Saltydog]

I jus love sucking up all this good, and free, information. Thanks to all of you, and to those that will weigh in after. I had no idea of the breadth of this issue. And gshelley, absolutely no idea that quality of an image capture was avail. My hope, was to use the recorder to take the work out of the capture, then download it to my PC to edit, then burn the final disks. Had no idea about the audio issues involved with doing that, and that there really wasn't much 'cleaning' that could be done after. Makes sense in hindsite. Well back to my notepad! And thanks again.

[lordsmurf]

the best qulity you can get is with a pc and a capture card.
i've tried a few standalone recorders, they are nice and can make the job
eazy, but i can get better qulity with a capture card.
if you are looking for the eazy way- go ahead and buy a standalone.
if you are looking for a realy good capture- use the pc.

you CAN see the outpt is just not the same, it comes very close - but not the same.

Try a JVC DRM10SL and get back to me. This is really not a true statement these days, not anymore. Image quality on recorders has come a long way since the Panasonic-only days.

The JVC gives my ATI some tough competition. Same for Hauppauge's. Tough competitor. Even low end Matrox units are breathing hard.

[zenzen1]

Well here's my 2cents worth. I have both a Panasonic DVD recorder (DMR50) and Canopus ADVC100 vid capture via the computer.
For capturing good quality TV reception, which requires little or no editing, I use the Panasonic.
I record onto DVDram discs, insert them into the computer, remove the station breaks with TMP DVD Author, then burn to DVD-R. Quality is superb.
For capturing VHS tapes, I use the Canopus ADVC 100 route for 3 reasons. (1) On most tapes, the lower 3 to 5 lines (at the base of the frame) are garbage, caused by bad tracking of the tape. This can be blanked out with a "fill" filter. (2) Most tapes suffer from loss of colour rendidtion after several years..They look "bland". This can easily be corrected with a saturation filter, and lastly (3) all vid tapes need some degree of smoothing filtering to reduce the video noise. Sure the Panasonic has an inbuilt DNR, but depending on how bad the vid noise is, I like to be able to set it up manually.
I can apply all of the above filters (and more if needed) by capturing to AVI, editing with Virtual Dub (cutting out glitches at scene changes, etc and applying the filters) then frameserving to CCE or Mainconcept. The results are usually better than the original VHS tape. Sure it takes longer, and I guess I'm lucky in that I have a dedicated VidCap computer, so it does not tie up my main computer.

[lordsmurf]

so it does not tie up my main computer.

I just thought of something.

I only have a desktop PC for video and photo. I can still survive e-mail, Internet and typing in Word on a P200 laptop.

I guess I bought mine to "tie it up". I wonder how many others have done the same thing... built a PC around video.

[bbllc]

I use a Sony RDR-GX7 dvd recorder. I have used that to transfer all of my VHS tapes and Tivo recordings to DVD. I am not as focused on the quality, since for me the quality is great. For me, it has saved a lot of time that capturing directly into the PC would have taken. All editing is done on my PC.

I use the clarifier from http://www.facetvideo.com in order to convert my commercial VHS tapes. I also use the following guide when editing the DVDs on my pc: http://www.dvdguideuk.dsl.pipex.com/dvdguide/editing1/editing1.htm
and
http://www.digitalfaq.com/edit/mpeg2vcr/mpeg2vcr.htm

Also, thank you Lord Smurf for such a user friendly site. I have learned a majority of everything about video editing from your site.

[zenzen1]

Hi Lordsmurf
The other great thing about having a dedicated video capture machine is that it is never connected to the Internet, and therefore is basically virus-free

[gshelley61]

Saltydog -

I'm glad you were impressed by the DVD image quality I was able to produce using the JVC recorder. Keep in mind I started with relatively high quality source material... the Titanic VHS is in good shape and was played back on a very well made JVC VCR that has TBC, DNR and 3D Y/C circuits of its own. A poor quality tape played back on a cheap P.O.S. VCR will not produce a stable, clear image and can't be corrected by the JVC recorder all by itself.

The same goes for the Blade Runner laserdisc. It is a Criterion CAV, using a very good Pioneer LD player that also has DNR noise reduction capability built-in. I would expect similar results from MiniDV, Digital8, S-VHS, Hi8, and even 8mm home videotapes if they are decent quality and played back on good equipment.

My point is simple... if your source looks pretty good, the DVD recorder method can be a really great alternative to PC capturing. If you have a really rough source (like an old, beat-up, noisy VHS), you will probably still have to capture AVI to your PC so you can apply more sophisticated filtering to clean it up.

Also, if you want do higher level editing using fancy 3-D transitions, multiple audio tracks, etc. then you will need to capture to AVI on the computer.

I'm happy you find this forum informative and the site helpful. This is where I learned much of what I know...

[macleod]

I have done both with an ati tv wonder pci card and the E30 panny and the panny wins hands down. I have a 4 head jvc VHS player with tbc and some other goodies built in. The panny has a tbc built in and a few tweeks of the panny using S-video cables and it is as good is it is gonna get. I, as others, capture to dvd ram and edit on the pc using tmpgenc dvd author, but have been known to reconvert to non standard dvd.

its a personal decision and other folks will.may disagree, but my panny does an awesome job and IMO blows away any cap card.