Capturing VHS to External Hard Drive...

[the colonel]

I have a large number of non-commercial VHS tapes (boxing, football) etc that I want to archive to external hard drive.

Originally I planned to do this with blu ray media but this remains an expensive option. Hard drives have fallen in price and are now an attractive option for storage.

Here is the plan:

Good quality Panasonic SVHS deck - external TBC - Panasonic hard disk recorder. (Basic editing will be done on the Panasonic hard disk dvd recorder).

I need a bit of advice on the best way to maintain quality in transferring the footage from the Panasonic DVD recorder to the external hard drive?

Doing a search on this forum I have seen using DVD-RAM discs and simply copying the contents to the external hard drive on my PC is the best way to preserve quality?

I want the option if required of being able to create a DVD-R disc that will play on any (most players) from the archived files on my external hard drive should I go the DVD-RAM route.

Help/ software recommendations would be appreciated on this?

I am happy with the quality of the DVD-R's that I produce directly from my Panasonic DVD recorder from VHS material. Will this quality be maintained if I go from the hard disk recorder to DVD-Ram to external hard drive to DVD-R? (I hope that makes sense).

Thanks in advance,

the colonel

[lowellriggsiam]

I have never had issues with DVD-RAM, I don't see that VHS to DVD would be that bad either. I have a Panasonic ES40V and can direct dub to DVD-RAM, or DVD and the quality is quite nice. I also have a VHS attached to my pc, but have little reason to use it. This method here was RJTECH W/HDD recorded from live TV (coax) hooked by composite connection to the Panasonic recorded onto DVD-RAM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB3AVlM5itI , so minus the youtube flv encoding you can see it does the job.

[the colonel]

A disappointing response to my thread but at least I got one reply.

Thanks Lowellriggsiam.

Regards,

the colonel

[hech54]

A disappointing response to my thread but at least I got one reply.

You are failing to understand that once you have "recorded" this footage to your DVD recorder...it
is just data now....it is digital. You still needed to chose a quality setting of the recording even if it
is going to the HDD and not a DVD-R....right? That quality level you have chosen is what you end up with...period.
The way you get that data to an external HDD will not change the quality level.

[lordsmurf]

I don't understand the question because it seems you're confused about what you're actually doing.

You convert your tapes to DVD. I'd go with a DVD-R, not a DVD-RAM, to ensure maximum compatibility on latter playback. DVD-RAM is forced to use VR mode DVD-VR format -- it's not DVD-Video compatible. DVD-R uses DVD-Video compatible recording.

You're using a good VCR, it seems. Good job.

After you have the DVD, just rip it to the hard drive, either as a long VOB file or as ISO's.
See http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/video/edit-dvd-recorder.htm
for ripping a big VOB to the drive.
See http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/video/copy-dvd-decrypter.htm
for ripping to an ISO. Obviously you'll skip the burning step.

[the colonel]

Thanks for the replies guys, I will elaborate a bit more on what I want to do.

There are about 700 3hr tapes (some recorded in LP!) that need archiving of which about half belonged to my late father, so this is no small undertaking. As you can imagine the tapes take up a lot of room which is what I hope to reduce by archiving. My brothers are going to help in reviewing the tapes although most are labelled and clearly not all will saved.

I do not want to archive to DVD-R because the discs will also take up too much space. As I said in my original post I had originally planned to begin archiving when blu-ray became more affordable. However, the price of blu-ray remains expensive and there is little sign of a significant price drop in the near future. However, the price of external hard drives have fallen significantly and are now an attractive option. Put simply I can get about 420 DVD-R's on a single 2TB drive which is a significant saving on space.

I am happy with the way I capture VHS analogue to my Panasonic DVD-Recorder, the quality is as good as its going to get. Recording to DVD-R and then copying/ converting to my desktop PC is going to be too wasteful in DVD-R discs given the volume I am dealing with. The option I am considering is copying the footage to DVD-RAM disc and exporting the complete DVD_RTAV folder (containing the BUP,VRO & IFO files) to my external hard drive. Any comments or suggestions on this? Anybody think there is a better way to do this?

The only other issue is how best to convert the VRO file into a format or DVD-R disc that will play on any machine. For example my family will want copies of my father's final holidays etc. On this I could do with some advice, the best software etc?

Thanks in advance,

the colonel

[lordsmurf]

Use DVD-RW, then.

[mpcengineering]

Wow, I don't envy you having that much to do! So you have PAL/NTSC material but are playing this back on an S-VHS deck right?

To be honest I would be very tempted to get hold of a capture card, and enough external hard drive storage on USB2.0 or Firewire-400 (for sufficient data rate), and capture directly to the drive. You will likely want to be capturing compressed, otherwise you are talking about around 120GB an hour, but bear in mind the fact you wont be able to play these files back without the capture card if you opt for hardware compression, and will require a sufficiently powerful CPU if using software compression.

[hech54]

So you have PAL/NTSC material but are playing this back on an S-VHS deck right?

Who in the hell said that?

[mpcengineering]

I did, whats wrong?

[the colonel]

Wow, I don't envy you having that much to do! So you have PAL/NTSC material but are playing this back on an S-VHS deck right?

To be honest I would be very tempted to get hold of a capture card, and enough external hard drive storage on USB2.0 or Firewire-400 (for sufficient data rate), and capture directly to the drive. You will likely want to be capturing compressed, otherwise you are talking about around 120GB an hour, but bear in mind the fact you wont be able to play these files back without the capture card if you opt for hardware compression, and will require a sufficiently powerful CPU if using software compression.

Yes that is correct, a number of my boxing tapes are in NTSC. However, this is not a problem as I have two S-VHS decks, one that outputs PAL and one that outputs NTSC.

Thanks for the advice but I would rather not go the 'capture card' route. From what I have read this can be far from straightforward and I am happy with transferring from my DVD recorder. Searching this forum in more detail I have decided to go with using DVD-RAM and I will edit with TMPGenc. Should results be disappointing I will try something else.

Thanks to all the posters that replied.

Regards,

the colonel