Recommendations From Scratch

[filmjax]

I'm now at the point where I can purchase a DVD Burner, which I will be using solely for backing up my old VHS collection to DVD.

My computer specs are as follows:

Athlon 1900+
80 GB Hard Drive
256 MB DDR RAM

I will be purchasing a DVD burner and a video capture card for my PC. I'm pretty sure that I'll be getting one of the Sony drives that burns both DVD-R and DVD+R, just to be safe. Anyone want to talk me out of that decision?

Also, what does everyone like best for a capture card? I'd really prefer something I don't have to install, but if all the external devices are junk, I'll go the installation route.

What seems to be the best dubbing software that everyone likes? I won't be doing a lot of editing... mostly straight dubs of already edited videotapes.

And, would you recommend purchasing a second hard drive? My PC has the slot for one, would it be a good investment considering the amount of dubbing to be done?

Any opinions would be greatly appreciated (and it'll be fun to watch the brand-wars... lol).

[LanceSteel]

I will be purchasing a DVD burner and a video capture card for my PC. I'm pretty sure that I'll be getting one of the Sony drives that burns both DVD-R and DVD+R, just to be safe. Anyone want to talk me out of that decision?

No, I won't talk you out of it. I have a Pioneer DVR-104 but if I didn't I would buy that sony drive.

Also, what does everyone like best for a capture card? I'd really prefer something I don't have to install, but if all the external devices are junk, I'll go the installation route.

Not ALL external devices are junk (only the ones made by dazzle.) The top user rated capture device on this site is the Canopus ADVC-100 (external firewire device.) I own one of these and I love it. It works with no drivers and it captures video and audio in perfect sync and with no dropped frames. If you can afford it ($260-$300) I would go with that.

What seems to be the best dubbing software that everyone likes? I won't be doing a lot of editing... mostly straight dubs of already edited videotapes.

I would just use DVIO ($free) to capture from the external device, virtualdub ($free) with a DV decoder codec (also $free) to edit and Tmpeg ($free or $49 for the plus version) to encode to Mpeg2 format.

And, would you recommend purchasing a second hard drive? My PC has the slot for one, would it be a good investment considering the amount of dubbing to be done?

How much free space do you have on your HD? I bought a second 120GB drive for video editing. If you capture DV it runs about 15-20GB per hour so take that into consideration.

[donpedro]

It is allways better to have second HD just to capture video (no interuption by OS HD activities)

As far as capturing from VHS ? I believe (havn't done any) that this is worst scenario for capturing So be prepared...

[filmjax]

How much free space do you have on your HD? I bought a second 120GB drive for video editing. If you capture DV it runs about 15-20GB per hour so take that into consideration.

I have about 50GB free on my current HD.

[filmjax]

As far as capturing from VHS ? I believe (havn't done any) that this is worst scenario for capturing So be prepared...

Oh... so VHS capture is troublesome?

[hwoodwar]

filmjax:

Yes capturing from VHS can be troublesome/problematic. I have done it roughly 40 times in the last three months.

The main capturing problems that I have encountered are: unavoidable dropped frames (from a weak signal, old tape, whatever), macrovision, jitter and tearing horizontally at the top of image. A good quality VCR helps some. I've been told a time base generator will possibly clear up the jitter and tearing horizontally at the top of image. There are software hacks and hardware to get rid of macrovision.

That being said, at least the tapes I've been capturing, those problems occur maybe 5-10 percent of the time (not including the times I encountered macrovision from original pre-recorded tapes.) It largely depends on the quality of the tapes you are capturing from.

Be prepared for a lot of experimenting with encoding procedures. I frequently experiment with different settings, resolutions and templates to try to get a good quality image on CD. Since you will be using DVD you will have the luxury of increased video bitrate, if you need it, to provide a better quality image.

[The village idiot]

Not ALL external devices are junk (only the ones made by dazzle)

Amen to that!

Also look at Datavideo DAC-100. Several posts on that one lately.

[filmjax]

The main capturing problems that I have encountered are: unavoidable dropped frames (from a weak signal, old tape, whatever), macrovision, jitter and tearing horizontally at the top of image. A good quality VCR helps some.

Well, I'm not looking to back up anything that would be copy protected... I'm strictly looking to preserve the thousands of tapes that I have of home movies, stuff recorded off television, etc.

That being said, any recommendations on a "good quality VCR" to maybe add to my purchase? I have 4-5 around the house, all are Philips/Magnavox 4-headers... what should I possibly invest in?

[LanceSteel]

I have about 50GB free on my current HD.

Yes, I would get another HD (if you are in the US a 120GB runs about $130 to $160.) The extra 120GB would give you a lot of room to play with. If you end up capturing in DV, 2 hours of DV video takes up 30GB so a 6 hour VHS tape takes up 90GB!

I have been backing up old VHS tapes for a while now (mainly old MST3K episodes) and haven't run into any problems with dropped frames etc. The VCR that I use is a Panasonic 4-Head HiFi that was about $100 when I bought it 2-3years ago and that works great for capturing. I also use it as the tuner for my capture device when I want to capture stuff off of the TV. Those Phillips VCRs that you have should work fine.

[donpedro]

(if you are in the US a 120GB runs about $130 to $160.)

I saw some deals on 120GB for $99 after MIR.... Look arround.

[filmjax]

It is allways better to have second HD just to capture video (no interuption by OS HD activities)

So getting a second hard drive... what exactly would this do in terms of performance? Would it speed up the time of captures/conversions? Or does it cut down on the possibility of errors like bad audio sync?

[filmjax]

I saw some deals on 120GB for $99 after MIR.... Look around.

I've been looking... know of any of these deals off hand?

[donpedro]

By having second, special disk just for capture you should avoid any problems (like missing frames) due another activity of disk (for example accessing som OS programs), and you can keep it nice, clean and defragmented so when you write on it it will be continuous process without disk heads jumping around to find empty space.

As far as deals... I don't know about any right now but time to time I see some. If I see any I can post it here.

[Thorn]

I would totally recommend the second drive: The best quality method I can think of is this:
1. Capture video to Huffyuv (~35GB/Hour)
2. Do any filtering, editing, cleanup with Virtualdub (or other program) and save back out to Huffyuv (when you're reading and then saving 30GB, you don't want to do this on the same drive. It goes twice as fast if you go from one drive to the other).
3. Encode with TMPGenc directly from the new avi, without frameserving. Frameserving and filtering at the same time is great for one pass encoding, but not so good for 2-pass VBR. If you're doing CBR or one-pass VBR then you may do fine with frameserving (and combining with step 2).
4. Author and then burn your new DVD compliant mpeg2s.

This may be more work than you're willing to go through, but it will certainly give you good results (relative to the quality of the video on the tape) so it's up to you - it's better to have the ability to do it even if you take shortcuts.

I wouldn't capture from VCR to DV simply because DV is NOT lossless and you'll loose some color information and whatnot. It's not much, but I don't like loosing anything when dealing with VHS because it's already touchy.

For filtering, I've done a little temporal smooting and I've used the smart smoother (by don graph or something - you have to download it separately for Virtualdub). It does wonders, but don't overdo it.


Disclaimer: My recommendations are all based on maximum quality, not ease of use. If you're willing to compromise to make it simpler to do, that's up to you.

[filmjax]

So would you recommend only capturing to the second hard drive? Keep all the actual programs on the main drive?

[filmjax]

Another question (sorry, like the category says, I'm a newbie),

I see in most posts that everyone uses Nero to burn. Is there a reason everyone uses Nero and not VCDEasy?

[LanceSteel]

So would you recommend only capturing to the second hard drive? Keep all the actual programs on the main drive.

Yes, you would want to keep the OS and all other programs on the primary "boot" drive and capture to the empty 2nd drive.

I see in most posts that everyone uses Nero to burn. Is there a reason everyone uses Nero and not VCDEasy?

When I was doing SVCDs I could never get VCDEasy to work right (I couldn't get my disks to FF/RW.) When I switched to writing DVDs, I needed a program that wrote dvds. Nero came with my drive and it wrote dvds so thats why I use it. If you plan on making VCDs/SVCD you could use VCDEasy, TSCV, Nero or VCDimager (with a bin/cue burning software.) I liked TSCV and VCDimager.

[Thorn]

Filmjax: remember that DVDs have to be authored. That takes a little more work than throwing a vcd on a disc (I spent a month playing around with encoding and authoring after I got my burner before I used it). If you get the bare drive without any authoring software you'll have to spring for some authoring software elsewhere (read up on the numerous threads about which program to use). I use Nero to burn the authored disc, but some people have had problems with getting the settings right for Nero. Make sure you get some RW discs to test before you wasted a disc.

[Nelson37]

Double Ditto on the second HD for capture only. This will NOT eliminate frame drops/synch issues, just minimize a major source of them.

A Sima Copymaster is well worth the $40.00 investment, there are other, higher quality Timebase and Color Correctors available, also VCR's which have this built-in. A digital VCR with these features may be worth the money if you are leaning that way anyway. But I think they are in the $800.00 range.

If I saw correctly that you have Thousands of tapes to convert, you may want to consider some sort of real-time encoding, unless you have a few years to complete the project. Capturing and re-encoding, plus authoring, is a very time-consuming process.

VCR tapes are highly variable in many ways, and present an interesting challenge. You will have to vary your methods much more than with DVD ripping.

[donpedro]

Double Ditto on the second HD for capture only. This will NOT eliminate frame drops/synch issues, just minimize a major source of them.

100% correct

[filmjax]

Ok, well, first the good news...

Bought the Sony DRU-500A and a 120GB second hard drive. Both work smashingly and I love them both. Haven't burned anything yet except to DVD+RWs, as I'm still toying with everything... but what I've done so far seems to work fine.

Now, the bad...

For some retarded reason I got conned into buying the Adaptec AVC-2200 USB VideOh! DVD piece of crap and (shocker!) it's a piece of crap. After spending about a week trying to get the stupid thing to do ANYTHING (only two programs capture from it), I'm fed up and it's going back.

Now I'm back to square one in regards to a capture device. This is what I need: Something that will allow me to capture from VHS (and, on a very rare occasion, 8mm camcorder). Once captured, I'll want to probably go in to the video and clean things up ever so slightly by trimming some edits I didn't do very well back when I was converting from VHS to VHS. I don't really need any bells and whistles... most DVDs I'll be burning will be video only, no menus or other nonsense.

I'm mostly converting home movies and television shows recorded in the late 80s - early 90s on a 2-head mono VCR. My PC does NOT have any firewire ports. I have one available AGP slot (so my unit says), two PCI slots, and a plethora of USB openings both 1.1 and 2.0.

My needs are in terms of preservation, I won't really be "creating" anything new. I have no timeframe to do this in... just looking to reduce the clutter of my spare bedroom by eliminating box after box of episodes of "Later with Bob Costas" and other ridiculous stuff I once taped religiously. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Those from individuals who are attempting some of the same things I am are even more so... appreciated.

[filmjax]

I downloaded the trial of Ulead MovieFactory 2... does most everything I want it to do. The multiple trim feature is what I was shooting for.

Ok, another stupid newbie question... is it better to capture to AVI and then convert to MPEG? Or just convert to MPEG to start with? Or does it matter?

[furball6969]

Filmjax:

There is a link to a guide to putting 6+ hours of video on one DVD-R using an ATI All in Wonder video card. The AIW is an AGP card and would replace your current video card if you choose to go this route.

It seems that the majority of users of this site are purists and won't have anything less than capturing to DV AVI first, then spending a lengthy period converting the capture to MPEG2 for authoring but I am not such a purist and cannot be bothered by re-encoding the video that I capture. The AIW does do a nice job despite what people here will try to tell you.

Captures with the AIW are real time and don't need to be re-encoded, they also take up about 4 GB for 6 hours using the settings in my guide.

I will try to post a sample of 2.3Mbit VBR 352x480 video with a link on the guide but I have trouble uploading larger files due to IRQ sharing on my PC.

[donpedro]

furball6969, I think that most difficult part about capturing in mpeg is cutting clip. First problem is with exact cutting and second is that when you cut, your clip will be (if you use some standard editing soft.) re-encoded after cutting. Ot let's say... editing is more difficult then with avi. Maybe I just don't know how to do it correctly or I don't the right sofware.

[furball6969]

TmpgEnc cuts mpeg2 just fine without re-encoding.

If yoiu go to the guide link in my SIG, there is a section on cutting with TMPGEnc.

[donpedro]

I will visit your guide... It is only that when I used TMPGEnc to cut, it was very unaccurate. About 3s difference between what I selected and where it realy did cut.

[gmatov]

Hullo,
Can one of you, maybe Furball, whose guide I'll be visiting as soon as this is off, tell me why you're capturing to DV from VHS? I mean, I'm using a Pinnacle PCTV PCI to capture from VHS, and VHS is such low quality that I don't know if you're going to get any advantage from DV. Pinnacle Studio captures in .avi, and as far as editing, I wound up with about 1100 separate scenes that each and every one of had to be dragged down to a story board to make a movie on the HD. This may be lousy software, but I've tried Adobe Premiere, and various others, and they all seem to work the same. Drag and drop, ad infinitum. The only good thing is that you can get rid of hundreds of ad scenes. ( You don't know how many ads you're watching till you have to flip pages to get back to the scenes you want to keep. ) Most of the previous is for captured TV ( With ads ) but I captured my daughter's wedding video, 78 minutes, no scenes to be removed, "Best quality", and it fit on one 70 minute CD with room to spare. I'm sure that converting to VCD, or SVCD would allow DVD playback, but you're not going to add anything to the quality. It's still going to be just as bad as the VHS was. Is there something better out there for me to use?
I just last night DLd the newest drivers from Pinnacle, haven't installed yet, and am going to have to.
I may be talking out my butt here, but my experience has not shown me any great quality from a capture card. All it does is allow you to share poor video in a cheaper, more compact way, as long as your target audience is young enough to be into DVD players, whereas my generation has enough trouble setting the time on these newfangled VHS thingies.
George

[donpedro]

Pinnacle Studio captures in .avi, and as far as editing, I wound up with about 1100 separate scenes that each and every one of had to be dragged down to a story board to make a movie on the HD. This may be lousy software...

You don't have to. If you go to menu "Setup" / "Capture source" you can choose how new scene will be detected (to avoid 1100 of them). Options are:

- Automatic based on shooting time and date
- Automatic based on video content
- Create scene every XXX seconds
- No auto scene detection -- press space bar to create scene

[dag]

Just been reading this thread. Please can someone explain to me, a very newbie, why most of the content of this site talks about using tmpgenc and nero rather than using a all in one solution like Ulead Video Studio.

Cheers

[trillium]

My personal reason is I just don't like the Ulead interface.

Best advice I can give is download the demos and try them of anything you are interested in. I did that and I went back to using TMPGEnc and Nero for my simple capture -> convert -> burn projects. Why? To me it was a little bit of overkill, but very time consuming because TMPGEnc can be VERY slow (30 hrs for 1hr44min of video).

When looking for a software package though, take your time and play with the demos, best thing you can do for yourself so you aren't investing in a software package that you will never use.