Help with Codecs for Video Catpture

[Johnbil]

I’m looking for some opinions. I’m going to archive some Mini DV & VHS tapes.

My intent is to archive these tapes to a hard drive and then DVD’s and maybe edit them down at some point. I may also want to view them on a Divx friendly standalone DVD Player. I’ve tried capturing with DV, Huffyuv, Divx and Xvid codecs.

What I’m looking for is the best quality without a huge file size. Can anyone who’s done this type of thing recommend a codec and settings?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks…John

[themaster1]

The signal coming out of the vcr being top field first you want to avoid DV (it record bottom field first)
If you want quality you can safely discard xvid, Huffyuv record huge files that leaves you with Lagarith.

Personnally i use huffyuv (i bought a 500gb hdd dedicated to capture) but i have tested with lagarith, it works too.

[jagabo]

The signal coming out of the VCR is neither top field first nor bottom field first. It is a series of fields alternating between top and bottom fields. It can be captured TFF or BFF. It can be burned to DVD as TFF or BFF. Film based material should be inverse telecined back to 23.976 progressive frames before making a DVD (or Xvid AVI, or h.264 MKV, or whatever).

All the lossless codecs don't compress much -- especially noisy VHS caps. All the high compression codecs are too slow for real-time capture, or give poor results with settings that are fast enough. Capture with a lossless codec like HuffYUV then convert to a lossy codec with slow, high quality settings. And clean it up with some filtering before encoding.

DV is a fair compromise. It only has about 180 lines of horizontal resolution for the chroma channels but NTSC VHS only has about 40 lines of chroma resolution, so you don't really lose anything. If you're really concerned about whether the video is TFF or BFF convering to DV BFF to TFF is as simple as shifting the image up or down by one scan line.

[hech54]

To go through all that capturing work and then waste it with crap like Xvid/Divx is just that....a complete WASTE. Xvid/Divx is a step DOWN in quality from DVD/MPEG2. You mentioned the word "archive"....that to me means at LEAST DVD/MPEG2 at a high bitrate.

[jagabo]

Xvid/Divx can be just as good as MPEG 2 with a smaller file size. Or better quality at the same size.

[Johnbil]

Thanks for your cimments, guys. I think I'm going to go with MPEG2. Can anyone recommend a capture program that lets you adjust the codec & bitrate?

John

[hech54]

Depending on the hardware involved....I use Magix Movie edit mostly.

[jagabo]

Real time softare MPEG 2 compression uses a lot of shortcuts to get the speed up. So it doesn't give as good image quality as a capture to lossless and subsequent slow conversion to MPEG 2.

[Johnbil]

Thanks again for the help.

[zerowalker]

Real time softare MPEG 2 compression uses a lot of shortcuts to get the speed up. So it doesn't give as good image quality as a capture to lossless and subsequent slow conversion to MPEG 2.

This is very important if you intend to get the most out of your captures, as with the compression artifacts you can´t hope to increase the quality the same way as removing noise from a lossless capture.