Converting 8mm to digital

[sfmedic]

What is a good program to use that allows converting home videos to DVD's. I have the setup for video capture, and the program that came with the conexant capture/tuner card uses .avi extensions. That took 15 GIGABYTES :Q just for 10 minutes of video. Since I have about 10 years of 8mm tapes, which only converts to about 20 tapes, 2 a year, I will need about say 240 dvd's. Now that doesn't include editing.

So what is a good program that allows video compression so I can get about 2 hours of video/audio on a single 4.7gb DVD?

 

[John P]

Do you have a newer digital camcorder?

I transferred all my 8mm to Mini-DV tapes and then from there to the computer. You could also borrow a digital camcorder that has a passthrough and record directly to the computer. I chose to back up to Mini-DV tapes first just so I had an extra backup of the raw video in addition to the 8MM tapes.

I use Pinnacle Studio to do all my capturing and Pinnacle Expression to burn the DVD's from the captured video. I have not captured analog with Studio in a long time so don't know how much room it takes up. A digital capture will take up about 4GB per 30 minutes or so.

Pinnacle Expression (newest version is called Pinnacle Instant Video Album and can be had for less than $40) will capture your analog video (assuming you have a capture card) as a large *.avi file. You can then add chapters, menu backgrounds, etc.. and set the compression ratio you want - I believe "best" video quality is about 59 minutes. You can choose to compress (render) it to whatever you want up to 124 minutes and burn it to DVD. I think I'v gone 10-20 minutes over the 59 before and didn't notice any noticeable change in quality.

 

[Mitzi]

I bought a cheap Winfast VC100 capture card to capture all my old Hi8 tapes. I've tried a few different applications to capture and the best one I've come across seems to be VirtualVcr though many people seem to rave about VirtualDub. As it stands I haven't actually captured any video yet I've just been doing test after test to try and derive the best settings.