Making an archival quality copy that is archival and viewable.

[cabruss]

I used a Canopus 300 to copy a one hour VHS tape to my computer resulting in a 13 gig DV-AVI file.

I then deshuck it with Virtualdub using Lagarith lossless resulting in a 40 gig Lagarith AVI file.

I plan to edit and remove about half unnecessary footage with Movie Maker, and add narration, transitions.

But, Instead of finishing with a highly compressed and lossy MP4 h.264 file, is it possible to use something like format factory and convert back to a managable maybe 6 gig DV-AVI file?

I have about 250 hours I would like to end up with a large external drive that could be used for viewing with a computer feeding a TV. Once the project is completed, I could make additonal backups from this master. Trying to kill two birds with one stone, Making an archival quality copy that is archival and viewable. Any opinions?

[jagabo]

Why didn't leave it as DV AVI? You don't improve the quality by converting to Lagarith, only make it bigger. 250 hour of DV AVI will almost fit on a 3 TB drive. Any computer can play DV AVI.

[cabruss]

That sure would simplify things, I thought that I had to de-shake in a lossless format to keep quality. Any advice on getting Virtualdub deshaker to output in DV-AVI. If I dont pick a compression then i understand it outputs at something like 90gig per hour.

Also Movie Maker the latest version does not offer me the option of DV-AVI. It does offer me a custom quality option. See picture. But it will be in WMV, or Mp4 h.264.

[jagabo]

I recommend you keep the original DV AVI as your archival copy. Only deshake the "hightlight reel" as deshaking will degrade the quality, especially with interlaced video. While deshaking with VirtualDub you can retain a tiny bit more quality with Lagarith -- but DV is really sufficient for VHS sources. You'd be very hard pressed to tell the difference between the two even looking at enlarged still frames. You can use Cedocida as the DV encoder in VirtualDub. There are others but Cedocida is the best and it's free.

By the way, you don't want a single hard drive to be your only backup. If that drive dies you'll lose your entire collection. Keep two hard drives. One off-site. Test them occasionally.