Captured all my old home videos to AVI... now what?

[w@ntonsoup]

So following this lovely forum's instructions, I have captured all of my old family home videos (8mm, VHS, and MiniDV) to the massive AVI files now residing on the 500GB hard drive I dedicated to this task.

1) They still need editing. Trim here, cut there.

2) The quality is unfortunately not terrific, most of it being like 20+ years old.

MY GOAL:
I want to make DVD's for the family that will obviously be playable in the home DVD players. So DIVX and other formats are out because of possible compatibility issues. But I want the quality as high as possible.

What do you recommend? If the best software isn't free, I can probably talk my wife into letting me buy it.

MY ASSUMPTIONS:
Edit in AVI, then do a single encoding to the final format (I assume MPEG-2 ?)

Any help is appreciated. first timer here with a LOT of freaking video clips ready to go!

[edDV]

For the MiniDV tapes go back and recapture over IEEE-1394 in DV format (use WinDV). The file on the hard drive will be bit identical to the DV tape and much higher quality than an analog capture.

Use a native DV format editor (e.g. Premiere Elements, Vegas Movie Studio or ULead Video Studio).

Each of these editors will also import your uncompressed AVI captures to either a DV or uncompressed project format.

[aedipuss]

expensive way- sony vegas pro 8, dvdlab pro, and imgburn to edit, encode, author and burn to dvdr. cheap - cruise the guides and pick up the free/shareware programs to do the job. there is a third alternative - the inexpensive all-in-one converters, but not too many are recommended at all, except maybe convertxtodvd which does a fairly good conversion of most avis, but lacks in the menuing department.

p.s. what type of avi are they all saved in? some are easier to deal with than others.

[w@ntonsoup]

recapture over IEEE-1394

Oh I did - I actually used WinDV to capture everything, because my camcorder has an A/V passthrough feature on that.

Thanks for the software recommendations, I'll start looking into them right now.

what type of avi are they all saved in? some are easier to deal with than others.

WinDV "Type 1 iavs"

[w@ntonsoup]

Question regarding these expensive programs - they all look to be around $100 which is fair if they really make my life a lot easier

Do they have features / filters to clean up the quality at all? I'm a total newbie and really frankly overwhelmed and out of my league with this stuff.

[edDV]

recapture over IEEE-1394

Oh I did - I actually used WinDV to capture everything, because my camcorder has an A/V passthrough feature on that.

Thanks for the software recommendations, I'll start looking into them right now.

what type of avi are they all saved in? some are easier to deal with than others.

WinDV "Type 1 iavs"

Traditional editors prefer Type2 DV format but I think most consumer programs now accept both. If not, there are utilities to convert Type1 to Type2 without loss.

So all your captures are DV format. That will simplify editing. The programs mentioned above all have basic level setting filters and other tweaks. Special cases can be exported to Vitualdub/AVISynth for more comprehensive filtering. All of your AV passthough captures will benefit from a 7.5% (16 digital level) reduction in black level. This is the classic "washout" senario where NTSC gets captured to level 32 instead of 16.

If you go for the "Pro" level programs (Premiere Pro or Vegas Pro) you get the monitor scopes that assist in setting levels. 80% of video correction is getting black set correctly. Most consumer DV (or HDV, MiniDVD, AVCHD) camcorders also run white about 8% hot so a nominal correction is to just lower white levels linearly 8% then tweak to taste. Digital camcorders usually record camera black correctly to level 16.

[spamiaint]

About removing noise, I've tried a few options out there, and all of them created unacceptable (to me) softness in the videos. The best noise-reducer I've seen is for still images, called Neat Image. Not sure if it could be used for video though. But you feed it a blank area of the image and it figures out what the noise is, so it then removes it from the rest of the image. Still some softness afterwards, but better than the low-light DV noisiness.

[w@ntonsoup]

Thanks for the ideas - I've just installed Vegas Pro 8 - whew it seems like a steep learning curve! I'm not even sure where to start right now.

[hanugro]

There is neat video from creator of neat image. I am bit suprise that this apps is not very popular. They work as plugin to premiere/after effect/vegas, etc. Google it. They also have trial version.

[binister]

Op, I am doing the same thing as you but on the cheap...

I am using AviSynth to frameserve to CCE Basic for MPEG2 output. Then I am planning to author in NeroVison and burn using Nero. About $100 out of pocket so far.

The AviSynth filter are awesome. I recommend you check it out. There is a learning curve but there are a ton of guides online.

Good luck!

[lordsmurf]

2) The quality is unfortunately not terrific, most of it being like 20+ years old.

Age has nothing to do with quality. I've got tapes from 1978 that are as clean now as the day the show broadcast or were recorded in a camera. The problem is more likely that you VCR is not good, the signals have not been filtered in the analog domain, and your capture hardware/software/settings may be lackluster.

Tapes can look better than most people understand..

[SingSing]

For the MiniDV tapes go back and recapture over IEEE-1394 in DV format (use WinDV). The file on the hard drive will be bit identical to the DV tape and much higher quality than an analog capture.

For VHS and Hi-8, capture them thru your miniDV cam analog pass thru.

..

Welcome back! Where have you been ? Doing time I bet.