Recommendations From Scratch

[donpedro]

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

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

This one doesn't sound bad :

Western Digital 160GB 8MB Buffer Internal Hard Drive for $159.99 after mail-in rebate (offer good until 2/28/03) at Outpost.com.

or

Maxtor 120.0GB 7200 RPM ATA133 Internal Hard Drive With 8MB Buffer
$199.99 - $70 Mail-In Rebate = $129.99 BestBuy

[gmatov]

donpedro,
Just found your reply to my drag and drop with Pinnacle Studio.
No auto scene detection. Does that mean that it can still be edited to remove say, commercials? Press space bar as near to start and end of ads, edit the start and end of half a dozen long scenes?
Hell, if that's the case, you're damn near a life saver. (Well, maybe not life, but a many hour saver, 'specially since it does have a tendency to lock up at random moments, sometimes recovery is possible, sometimes not.)
Mebbe I'd best experiment with this program a little. I just went straight at it,
after I got it running, figuring I had it licked. Mebbe no, huh?
Thanks,
George

[donpedro]

Yes. It will create scenes whenever you press space bare during capture.

You can even split clip manulay later (to add scene).

[johnmeyer]

I have several things to add regarding transfer of VHS, SVHS, 8mm (analog) or Hi-8 videotape to DVD.

First, if you have lots of tapes to transfer, it will take lots of time. The fewer steps required, and the less babysitting you have to do, the better. Therefore, Furball's approach of using a capture card to do real-time MPEG encoding and then simply authoring and burning the results makes a lot of sense. Go to the link he gives above and follow his steps.

I have several comments on his recipe, however. My first comment is that I get artifacts if I leave the "Deinterlacing" box checked (in the MPEG wizard setup). I always clear this box. Second, while you can do quick cuts using the TMPGEnc tools, on long (30-60 minute) MPEG2 VBR files, TMPGEnc has given me edit points that are off by as much as 15 seconds (it may be possible to minimize this problem by using CBR instead of VBR). Finally, his guide is oriented towards fitting a ton of video on one disk. If you are instead trying to fit a single two-hour tape on a single disk, you can increase the size back up to 720x480 (for NTSC) and the bitrate back up to 3-4 MB/sec.

My second comment is aimed more at the purists amongst you. Furball's approach gives pretty good results, but there is one nasty problem not addressed by his approach.. This has nothing to do with whether the capture is done using high-loss or low-loss methods (i.e., DV vs. MPEG vs. Hufman, etc.), or what bitrates are used. Instead, it has to do with the nature of the artifacts in analog video. Most analog video is noisy. This shows up on the screen in a variety of ways, but most noticeably as a little snow overlaid on top of the image. It is more noticeable in slow speeds (EP). MPEG encoders don't do a good job when this snow is present. To get really astounding results, you need to get rid of this snow before you encode. Unfortunately, the work flow for this is not as simple as what Furball recommends, so what I'm about to describe is not for everyone. With that said, here is an approach that will give you VERY good video from analog video sources.

1. Set up your VCR correctly for high quality capture. I don't think anyone has mentioned this, but it is probably the single easiest step towards getting better quality, and many of you may not be doing this. There are two parts to proper setup. First, make sure you use the composite video or, better yet, the S-video output of your VCR. Do NOT connect the RF output of your VCR into your capture card (if your capture card supports it -- I have the AIW Radeon 8500 DV and it has an RF input).

2, This is the key step many people overlook -- turn on the edit switch on your VCR. Not all VCRs have this. If yours doesn't, you should look into getting one that does. On the newer VCRs, this is no longer a separate switch, but instead a menu item labeled something like "Tape Dub." Once you turn it on, you will see an immediate difference. The picture will nosier, and the little white halos around dark to light transitions will disappear. Most VCRs use a combination smoothing and edge enhancing circuit to mask the noise in the VHS signal, while making the picture look crisper. A surprising amount of detail is lost with this process, however. The edit switch turns off this circuit.

3. Capture in an editable format. For me, that means capturing using the passthrough on my DV camcorder. This gives me a DV AVI file. Those with better encoders can use those instead. Do not capture using MPEG encoders, not because of the defects in that encoding process, but because you can't take the next step if the video is in MPEG1 or MPEG2 format.

4. Clean the video. I can't give a one-size-fits-all cookbook for this step. However, I have good results for a wide range of videos by using Virtualdub and two filters. I load the Chroma Noise Reduction filter by Giles Mouchard followed by the Temporal Cleaner by Jim Casburi. I use the default settings for both as a starting point. Sometimes I use just the Temporal Cleaner. If my video has lots of shimmering and ghosting around saturated colors, especially reds, I sometimes use just the Chroma Filter. I save the results back to an AVI file using the MainConcept DV codec. Many, many people have tested this codec and shown that it introduces very little generation loss.

5. When I'm finished, I encode with TMPGEnc (using the default DVD template) and then author and burn in Ulead's MovieFactory. You can use just about anything that works for you for the authoring and burning. However, I still haven't found anything that beats TMPGEnc for encoding. With TMPGEnc, I just use CBR and crank the bit rate up and down depending on how much video I want to fit on the disk. You might want to test a few 30-second clips of your material using different encoding rates to see if you can see much difference. As Furball has found out, with VHS source material, you can reduce bitrates quite a bit before encoding artifacts will start to be a bigger factor than the noise in the source material. However, as in any good engineering design, you want to maintain the quality through the process until the final step to avoid having several small quality compromises start to compound and result in noticeable degradation.

With this process, the resulting video, when viewed on a large TV monitor, looks better than the original in every way.

Hope this helps.

[gmatov]

donpedro,
Thanks again for the quick return.
Wow, I can do this with 1/2 a dozen scenes, or clips, and here I thought what a great program, before. After a captured project, a dialogue box would pop up, "Improving Scene Detection" and I'd have even more scenes to drag.
Gotta try this soon as I get home from some errands.
George

[gmatov]

DomPedro, Filmjax,
Hope it's not too late, but CompUSA has a 120 gig, their brand, is a Maxtor, for 150, 10 instant, 140, pay tax, 40 buck rebate, 100 bucks, plus tax on 140.
I bought one the other day, but needed to go to MS to get the new version of fdisk to fdisk it. Original 98 fdisk drops 64 gig. 100 gig fdisks as 36 gig. Download and replace your, I think, March 99 fdisk with the versiopn dated, I think, May 2000. Ignore the max in fdisk. It will tell you cap is 117XX, looks like 11Gigabyte, but evidently 98's fdisk can't display the rest of the digits. Once you have less than 100 gig to work with, the rest of the capacity is acurate.
BTW, my board is only a few months old, and MS acknowledges that this is an MS problem, and makes the DL freely available, tho you have to search for it.
The board does see the full capacity.

[donpedro]

Yep.... I have got one too It is waiting in the box to install it. 120GB for $99 Great deal.