VHS Backup

[boldego]

I want to be able to back up my son's VHS tapes and was wondering if the Dazzle DVC II and Sima SCC Pro Video Color Corrector / Clarifier / Stabilizer Enhancer would be all that I needed. I have read a lot of posts and was wondering if this would be a good choice. Also, sould a 40 gig hard drive be enough?

[D_Knife]

Absolutley - should work very well.
If your sons's tapes are in good condition you should send me the Sima SCC Pro Video Color Corrector / Clarifier / Stabilizer Enhancer

In all seriousness you only need a authoring package like Nero or VCD Easy.

If you want some tips with the Dazzle let me know!

[boldego]

I was thinking about the stabelizer for the macro vision or will the dazzle take care of that on it's own?

[D_Knife]

No the dazzle has no macrovision support - It ignores it completely - well let me say mine does (I have the Australian version that supports PAL/NTSC/Secam , I don't know if there are other versions)
I have copied everything even DVD's with it.

But if you have the budget then go for the stabelizer to clean up the video, after all garbage in, garbage out

[boathouse]

Perhaps you could give me some advice, since I'm considering buying the dazzle DVC II...

How good is the quality when copying DVD's and VHS?

If you plug a TV into the dazzle can you play Mpeg and DivX movies on the PC but watch them on the TV?

Thanks for your help...

[boldego]

Thanks D_Knife.

[D_Knife]

Quality is quite good especially when you factor in not having to wait for any encoding to finish

The quality can't match a 2-pass VBR encoding with either TMPGEnc or CCE - naturally no hardware encoder even could - but still does a good job

VCD - not bad but I would only show junk with and nothing good, the resize is poorly done, better to cap in SVCD or DVD and re-encode down to VCD

SVCD - quite good, I use this for most things nowdays - It's easy, looks good and can be dumped striaght to Nero and played on my DVD player(s)

DVD - looks just like the original in most cases, the only time this falls down again is when there is a huge amount of movement on the screen such as anime or stuff like that.

You can playback MPEG clips (not Divx) to a TV but it's a software decoder, I bought a videologic cheapo knockoff of a Hollywood Plus card (use hollywood plus drivers! )for about AU$90 and use that to play my MPEG's back to TV

The card comes with moviestar as the main capture program - it's really bad and bloatware in my opinion - I use only the capture part of it
Moviestar use 24.5 MB of RAM and 14.8MB of swap space and a chunk of drawing and control resources - before I switched to XP I had a few resource crashes in Win98. Things are much better now with XP
Moviestar comes with a simple NLE editor (crap), picture cap (again crap) and sound editor (still crap, are you seeing a pattern here? ). I rarely use it now, I prefer using TWNH it's a reverse designed Dazzle capture program that uses MUCH less resources than Moviestar.

You can only use Moviestar or TWNH to cap nothing else will work.
Anyway if you want any more info please mail me - If I can help great!

[jbarr]

I want to do the same thing -- archive some VHS tapes. I have a Canon ZR45MC MiniDV camcorder that does GREAT VHS captures, except when the VHS tape has Macrovision encodeing. The ZR45MC halts all pass-thru.

I am hoping that a device like the Sima SCC Pro could be put inbetween the VCR and the camcorder.

Any thoughts?

Note: I'm not proposing to do anything illegal. I just want to preserve the investment I made in a collection of several degrading VHS tapes that aren't available on DVD.

[boldego]

What is TWNH?

[D_Knife]

Well expanding on what I said here

TWNH it's a reverse designed Dazzle capture program that uses MUCH less resources than Moviestar

This little app was reverse engineered to combine all the directshow modules that Moviestar calls without loading all the junk that goes along with it such as the clip editor, picture capture and sound edit feature (all of which are crap as said above) TWNH also adds in some nifty scheduling and support for cap large amounts of footage by breaking capture chunks into segments.
You can find TWNH here:- http://stop.at/TWNH