Asking advice about HARDWARE for VHS VIDEO conversion projects

[perniente]

Hello, we are a buddhist organization trying to digitalize 400 video tapes, and preserve them for future editing and publication.
(So our aim of first stage in this year is to save all the avi files in external HDs)
We'll have 4-5 people work on this but all new to this field.
What we have in hand or just acquired devices are:

Our simple workflow in plan and some new/old devices we have are as follows:

1. SVHS Vcr : 2 JVC HR s9800U (new) panasonic PV VS 4820/PVS 7670 (old)
2. DAC : 2 Datavideo DAC-15
3. Computers: 2 PC/ 2 iMac
4. Software: Final Cut Express, Adobe Premiere pro 2, imovie 08, Ulead

I have glanced these forums whiling making orders, and think that as described by experienced user,
full frame TBC, video processor and proc amp will be a great help for our project.
So we need to ask not a few advices:

D/A Converters (still need two):
1.Will the video process function (color correction) in dac-15 be good enough as a video processor?
2.How would you choose among converters with TBC like Canopus ADVC 300/700/DAC-30?
3.We just found out that we have a Sony DSR-PD Camcorder that can be used as a D/A Converter,
but we don't know the differences it can make on picture quality, will this be a good choice?

The list we are considering includes (but no used item)
TBC:
Datavideo TBC-1000 ($479)/ 3000 ($719)
Prime Image 50II ($1890, with proc amp and enhancement)
Keywest BVTBC10 ($1100,with proc amp and enhancement)

we dont know if the later 2 work better than
TBC-1000/3000+Signvideo dual proc amp ($449/649)+ video enhancer($299)


Anyway it's also a question of combination and hope you can have some budget-quality
balanced advices. Other solutions are greatly welcome. e.g. we may still need to buy new VCRs so
the models can also be discussed.

[harley2ride]

Since you said you are doing preservation work, I would suggest using your VCR's that you have, go though a (dac, ads pyro av/link, or canopus advc), save as dv-avi to hd. I suggest that once you have all video archieved to hard drive, use an external hd to make a full backup. The odds of losing both hard drives would be pretty astronomical. I don't have any personal knowledge of your particular DAC, so you may want to get some info comparing it to the ads pyro or canopus. Just make sure that when you are transferring the video to the pc, that you have two seperate hard drives (1 with software, and one for transfer/storage), and that you make sure the storage hd is defragged before you start.

[redwudz]

Just for reference, 400 tapes = ~5TB (5000GB) of DV at one hour per tape. 2 hours per tape would get you over 10TB. For full backup, double that. DV is about 13GB per hour of data. If you need to keep the tapes in the DV format, then you will need a lot of storage. I don't think you would want to keep that all on hard drives. But you may be converting to DVD as you process the tapes.

You also want to consider the encoding time for the DV files to DVD, along with authoring and burning to disc. Encoding time depends on your CPU speed. Multiple computers would speed this, but also raise the costs.

It sounds like you may also want to burn to more than one DVD disc per video. You might consider a DVD duplicator to speed that up.

Another option might be DVRs and record directly to DVD disc. It depends if the tape data needs editing. Otherwise, DV may be a good choice. There are DVRs with FireWire inputs that would fit into the rest of your hardware.

Just something to consider.