CONVERTING ANALOGUE FILM TO DIGITAL AND BURNING TO DVD

[VIDEONEWBOY]

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Hi, I am very new to this game and would appreciate any help you can give me. I have many films taken on a Canon Hi 8 camera. I have edited these and burnt to DVD but I am very disappointed in the loss of quality in the finished products. I understand I can convert these analogue films to a digital quality before editing for improved results. I looked at the Dazzle Video Creator Platinum which has a good price but have been told the performance is not very good. I have also looked at the DataVideo Dac 200 and would appreciate comments on this device. I have also been told I can copy to a digital camera with suitable input and would appreciate on what results I am likely to obtain with this method. I think I have enough emory on my computer for editing and would also appreciate any information on what I should convert my edited film to for best results when burning to DVD.
Thank you,
Alan[/b]

[guns1inger]

OK. Before getting too far into this, you need a little expectation management. Converting analogue to digital does absolutely nothing in and of itself to improve quality. You would get the same results by simply plugging your camera into a DVD Recorder and creating your DVD that way.

What converting to digital may afford you is the opportunity to tweak the quality to a degree to improve it before burning to DVD. However you need to be realistic about what you will get out of it. You will not turn hi-8 into DVD quality. Period. Depending on the quality of your source tapes, the difference may be negligible.

That said, there are a number of ways to convert analogue to digital, and a number of pieces of equipment that might be included in the conversion chain to improve quality. If you also have a mini-DV camera, it is worth checking to see if it does analogue pass-through. If so, you can connect it to the PC via firewire cable and have the camera do the conversion for you. No need to even record it to mini-DV tape.

[VIDEONEWBOY]

Thank you for your reply and although it is not what I wanted to hear it is what I had expected.
I am able to borrow a mini-dv camera and it may be possible to either pass through the analogue direct via firewire cable or I may need to copy. If I want to try some experimentation in improving quality how would I go about it? Also, when I burn it to DVD what is the best quality I can expect to obtain if I am sensible and keep the quantity on each DVD down to a minimum? Would this be MPEG2? Sorry, to show how ignorant I am on this subject but any further informaton would be appreciated.
Thanks!

[guns1inger]

Start with What is DVD (top left corner). The best quality, as far as minimal compromise from the encoding, would be a running time of less than 70 minutes, encoded with Constant BitRate (CBR) encoding at around 9200 kbps for the video, plus audio on top. Some would say this is a ittle high for some players, but the DVD space says 10080 kbps combined (audio + video) is the maximum, and I have never had a problem going into the mid-9000's. And yes, this would be mpeg2 for video, and I would suggest AC3 (Dolby Digital) for audio.

As for filtering - it really depends on what sort of problems you need to fix. While most editing programs have a basic set of filters, some being quite powerful (Vegas' Colour Correction filters, for example), the two best tools to have in your arsenal are virtualdub and avisynth. Both have a huge range of filters, mostly free, that can do some fine work in the right hands, and completely screw up an image in the wrong hands. Virtualdub is the more user friendly, in that it has a GUI to work with. Avisynth is arguably the more powerful, but it is script based. It's GUI is notepad. The place to read about avisynth is the Restoration forum. I advise browsing through posts and just reading about problems and solutions. You will quickly see what, if anything, suits your particular issues.

[VIDEONEWBOY]

Thank you for giving such a detailed answer. I will give it all a go and also have a look to see if other items in the posts can help me too as you have suggested.
Thanks again!