Analog-to-Digital Conversion

[PhoenixOrion]

How's the image quality?

Better or worse than using PCI card video capture converters?

 

[MScrip]

I've captured hours and hours of old VHS footage through my Panasonic PV-GS200 camera using A-D conversion. It's all been perfect! Your camcorder should perform similarly.

VHS VCR --> analog AV cable --> GS200 --> Firewire cable --> Firewire port --> video editing app

Of course, old VHS tapes suck ass to start with... but the picture will never get any worse!

 

[PhoenixOrion]

True. Image quality can only be as good as the source.

I only have a few home movies to convert and I was contemplating of buying a cheap vid capture card.

But I think I'll just use the a-d converter in my digicamcorder.

With the video edit app, what video format to save it? DV, MPEG, AVI? to minimize loss of quality prior to DVD authoring/burning?

 

[MScrip]

I use Pinnacle Studio and capture it as an AVI file. It takes up the most hard drive space, but it's the highest quality you can get from a capture. You'll use up about 13 GB per hour... 215 MB per minute...

After you capture your video, you can edit your video, make menus and chapters, etc. Then you must render your project. This is the encoding step. It takes your movie and compresses it as MPEG2 for the DVD.

Bottom line... capture video as AVI and you'll have the best quality.

What camcorder and software do you use?

 

[PhoenixOrion]

Studio 8 and Canon Elura for this project.