Hi8 Video- What shall i do with it?!

[Albert Wendall]

Hi,

Sorry, if this has been answered; i have searched .avi and hi-8 but don't really know what i am looking for
My old Hi-8 Camcorder has now been replaced by a DV one 8)
I have about 8 x 60 minute tapes which i inputed into my ATI card via Pinnacle. I let them all play and captured the footage. The idea was to make a master copy of all the tapes before editing them. I then transfered the .avi files (unedited) Pinnacle made of them and put them on an external drive.
Storage isn't a problem, but i want to know if i have done the right thing. Should i burn them to a DVD- i think they are more than 4.5GB per tape.
The idea is i would like to have digital master copies and also edited versions of the footage burned to DVD.

Thanks for reading my long post!

[edDV]

4.5GB for a 2 hour Hi8 tape is too much compression for Hi8. AVI file? what codec were you using?

For best quality you would dub to DV tape or use DV passthrough to the HDD. Then encode that to DVD MPeg2 after discarding what you don't want.

That would mean a raw file of 27GB per tape. I'd suggest no more than 90min per DVD or more than 6500Kbps VBR average @720x480.


PS: I see you are using 60min Hi8 tapes so each tape would yield 13.5GB DV transfers. If you had captured uncompressed YUV the file size would have been ~ 70GB/hr or more.

[Albert Wendall]

Hi Ed,

Thanks for your reply. I have a Panasonic NVGS200 which only has one connection which is labelled in the manual as DV in/out. To pass thorugh i would have to have two wouldn't I?

[edDV]

Hi Ed,

Thanks for your reply. I have a Panasonic NVGS200 which only has one connection which is labelled in the manual as DV in/out. To pass thorugh i would have to have two wouldn't I?

According to this
http://shop.pcmag.com/shop/product_specs/Panasonic+NVGS200+Mini+DV+Digital+Camcorder/21916421.aspx

You have only analog PAL composite input, not S-Video (better). No mention of "Pass-Through". So use that input to dub to DV tape. Then transfer to the hard disk.

Some UK models have all analog inputs blocked unless you pay some kind of tax.

Second choice is uncompressed capture through the ATI card.

[Richard_G]

It isn't just analogue inputs, but any inputs. If it has DV in, it will have analogue in too. Passthrough amy be an option which will be selectable by a menu item (I don't know about Panasonic, but my Sony has an AV>DV ON/OFF option).

The tax issue is that the import duty on a video recorder is higher than on a camcorder. As a camcorder with inputs can be used as a video recordr, it is classed as that at import and the tax charged accordingly. This then pushes the price up to all customers but the vast majority are having to pay extra because the camcorder has a feature that they will never use. Consequently, the lower end of the market camcorders have the inputs disabled to keep the tax, and hence the retail price, down.

[edDV]

It isn't just analogue inputs, but any inputs. If it has DV in, it will have analogue in too. Passthrough amy be an option which will be selectable by a menu item (I don't know about Panasonic, but my Sony has an AV>DV ON/OFF option).

The tax issue is that the import duty on a video recorder is higher than on a camcorder. As a camcorder with inputs can be used as a video recordr, it is classed as that at import and the tax charged accordingly. This then pushes the price up to all customers but the vast majority are having to pay extra because the camcorder has a feature that they will never use. Consequently, the lower end of the market camcorders have the inputs disabled to keep the tax, and hence the retail price, down.

Should his question be redirected to the tax ministry or the local MP?

[Albert Wendall]

Thanks for the help guy's. So, if i import the .avi footage in to Pinnacle 10, will it compress to fit the desired amount on to a DVD, assuming i use around 40 minute run time?

Albert

[edDV]

Thanks for the help guy's. So, if i import the .avi footage in to Pinnacle 10, will it compress to fit the desired amount on to a DVD, assuming i use around 40 minute run time?

Albert

I'm assuming these are important camcorder tapes and that you care about the quality. Software compression while capturing will reduce MPeg2 quality vs. uncompressed capture and MPeg2 encoding as a second step.

Hardware encoding (as done in the MiniDV camcorder or a hardware capture card) can be done realtime. That is why camcorder capture is your best option. Pinnacle's consumer MPeg2 encoder is among the worst.

Uncompressed capture (using AVI YVYU or YUV2) will get a better quality capture but will use alot of disk space (~70GB/hr). Huffyuv lossless compression is possible with your CPU and that will reduce hard disk usage to about 30GB/hr. The idea is to capture with high quality and slow encode with 2 pass VBR MPeg2 for best compression.

If you can live with ~1 hr. per DVD, high bitrate CBR (~8-9000Kb/s) encoding usually works better for shaky camcorder material.

Do some tests and see which works best for you.