analog to digital video conversion advice

I've been searching around for this for some time (have no much experience on it yet), so far unable to find the answers I need. Maybe this might be a nice tutorial to offer.

OK: I want to preserve and mostly to edit a little my personal, historical family-travels, etc. videos. They are on just a few analog 8mm videocassettes and I don't pretend so save everything, just what seems the most valuable footage and then edit it, mostly cutting and pasting, plus some audio post production; in order to obtain something more edible and less boring to watch at. So:

what format(s) and which parameters on that format(s) will make the best sense to use for capturing ?
of course can't be plain AVI (don't have terabytes HD) My guess is that it should be MPEG-2 ¿how many Mbit/sec should I aim for?

Should I use just the ATI capture card (see below) bundled software or another software to capture?

considering the source material are 8mm low res NTSC norm videocassettes, and then I'll need to edit the material before the final mastering to DVD or SVCD (I guess those should be the final formats nowadays, don't have a DVD burner yet though, but I guess that would change sooner or later). And I don't have a last gen video workstation. Now I have just a 1 GHz CPU and an ATI Rage 128 pro AIW capture card running on Win2K, and may get an extra 80 to 120 GB HD to do this. Getting any extra software not being an issue.

please don't be ashamed to get into all the detail you may feel necessary to obtain good results (like when following chickenman tut on DVD to DivX I or anyone here can manage to get very good results). Also, recently following different tutorials and posts I was able to do a very satisfying job on transferring my old LP's to CD's (I'm not for lousy jobs).

So good old chickeman or anyone else who may have experience on this matters, please advice here...
 
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Couple of golden rules when capturing, capture at the maximum size possible and the maximum bitrate possible that your PC can handle before getting dropped frames.

Try capturing to MPEG2, as its easily edited and if you make sure its DVD compliant, then all you need to so after editing is to author and burn. (get yourself a DVD Player, you wont look back).
 
ChickenMan said:
... (get yourself a DVD Player, you wont look back).
I mention not having a DVD burner yet, I guess you meant that. I'll have one eventually, kind of waiting 'till the industry sets the final standard

by the way thanks for your answer, but can you be a little more specific about DVD compliant

also, I understand the golden rules but for the source format I'm working on -8mm videocassette- maybe is worthless to capture at sizes bigger than the source and I guess after some point there might be worthless bitrates

I have been reminded of the possibility of capture my analog videos from a digital camera and that will do the analog to digital conversion, will that be better considering my CPU and capture card ?
 
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ponzan said:
I mention not having a DVD burner yet, I guess you meant that. I'll have one eventually, kind of waiting 'till the industry sets the final standard
I think unless something else amazingly comes up on the rails (the new HD-DVD "blue laser" format anyone?),It looks 75% certain it`ll be the plus (DVD+R/+RW) format (according to most industry reports..)
 
ChickenMan said:
Couple of golden rules when capturing, capture at the maximum size possible and the maximum bitrate possible that your PC can handle before getting dropped frames.

Try capturing to MPEG2, as its easily edited and if you make sure its DVD compliant, then all you need to so after editing is to author and burn. (get yourself a DVD Player, you wont look back).
Yeah,it`s gotta be MPEG2 (but I love MPEG4/DIVX/XVID also.. :) ) I`ve ripped VHS from a VCR many times..Using NVidia WDM (with WDM A/V Crossbar) and Ulead VideoStudio 6..Mainly at 720x576..video bit rate 2000kbps (this is a safe bet bitrate ponzan..)(I suppose I could go higher though) but no dropped frames.(I use my native PAL at 25fps)..You know the rest... :)
 
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ponzan said:
I mention not having a DVD burner yet, I guess you meant that. I'll have one eventually, kind of waiting 'till the industry sets the final standard...
Just about all DVD Burners now support both +R and -R DVD's now, so no reason to wait at all. I'm not convinced the +R will prevail anyway, as all the industry talk is just propaganda from Phillips and Sony. Just wander down to your local DVDR supplier and ask him approx what % of his sales are +R and -R. My supplier told me +R sales have risen 500% in the past 6 months, they were 1% and now 5%.
:rolleyes:

DVD compliant stream, I mean a 720x480/576 MPEG2 with a bitrate of at least 5000.
 
ChickenMan said:
Just about all DVD Burners now support both +R and -R DVD's now, so no reason to wait at all. I'm not convinced the +R will prevail anyway, as all the industry talk is just propaganda from Phillips and Sony. Just wander down to your local DVDR supplier and ask him approx what % of his sales are +R and -R. My supplier told me +R sales have risen 500% in the past 6 months, they were 1% and now 5%.
:rolleyes:

DVD compliant stream, I mean a 720x480/576 MPEG2 with a bitrate of at least 5000.
he,he,he-And did your supplier tell you how many +R he had in stock in the first place? Quality +R (especially +RW!-rockin` horse s**t! LOL)has always been harder to find than -R up until quite recently.Now they`re startin` to appear more frequently.. :)

Hmmm...5000 eh? Never gone that high..3000 was my limit.Tried over 3000 then I started to have compatibility problems -though other factors could`ve been involved also... :D
 
tnx pals, sorry about this but I still have some doubts here. I'm not trying to be a smart ass, as said, I've done yet some research and trials on this but I fell video stuff is one of the more complex issues I've ever confronted and doing this is going to be lot of work, so I want to assure I'm going to start OK, that's why I'm asking all this:

if my source videos were meant to be seen on TV ain't that 640x480 ?

I have try capturing MPEG2 that size and can get bitrates around 2000, over that I began to drop frames, quality seems OK (the source videos don't look much better anyway)

What about capturing through a digital camera, will that provide better results ?

ChickenMan is right, most DVD burners coming out lately support + and - formats, and prices have dropped quite a lot. I guess I'll go after one, after adding a new at least 120 GB HD with an extra IDE controller card.

any extra suggestions will be appreciated, thanks again

(also thanks LTR12101B for the arstechnica link, lots of great info there)
 
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I wouldn´t recommend to capture with mpeg compresion if you want to edit your footage, instead of that use Virtualdub to capture and use Huffyuv codec to compress the video then using the filters of virtualdub you can resize, clean or do a lot of improvements to your video and for space saving in you hd you can use the frame server included in virtualdub to render with an external encoder like Cinemacraft.

To get a full step by step guide on this go here:http://www.doom9.org/ and take a look in the guides section.
 
ponzan said:
if my source videos were meant to be seen on TV ain't that 640x480 ?

I have try capturing MPEG2 that size and can get bitrates around 2000, over that I began to drop frames, quality seems OK (the source videos don't look much better anyway)
No,I think you`ll find on a TV MPEG2 is OK using 720x576 PAL(720x480 for NTSC) @2000kbps.(But 3000kbps is possible...)And no dropped frames.Trust me..the proof is in the pudding..because I`ve done it b4... :) :)
 
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tnx very much guys for all your very usefull info and links, still much to learn here, some things getting clearer though (like this is much complex than anything I've guessed in advance) :rolleyes:
 
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