Transferring old home movies to DVD

[Rebel7254]

combine images from two 4.7 GB DVD+RW's to put on one DVD+R DL? I am currently in the process of moving all of our footage from old Beta tapes to DVD. I'm doing this by hooking up the Sony Beta VCR to my Lite-On DVD recorder. The problem is I can only get an hour of video on each DVD because I have to record on HQ (high quality) mode. Believe it or not you can see a fair amount of video compression using SP mode even on the 20 year old Beta tapes, which would allow me to put 2 hours on each DVD. Since these tapes have priceless memories on them, I don't want to lessen the quality of the video at all. Beta was always better than VHS in quality anyway.

Well, in Beta tapes alone we probably have about 18 hours of footage. I'd rather not have to use 18 DVDs. After I'm done with the Betas we still have a few VHS tapes and several mini-DV tapes to transfer. If I don't come up with a way to get more footage per DVD, then we're gonna end up with dozens of DVDs, which would be a pain to deal with. So what I thought I could do was burn the videos on regular DVD+RW's, find a way to combine the images from two of them onto a DVD+R DL disc, and just erase the DVD+RW's once I have the video transferred to DVD+R DL discs. It would be so much better to get around two hours per DVD than just one.

I used to have a program called VCDgear. I think I could probably use it, but I'm not sure I could convert the video into mpeg format without losing any quality.

Anyway, I'm open to suggestions. I suppose if the only way to get more video per DVD was to lessen the quality, then we'd just deal with a whole bunch of DVDs because the quality of the video is first priority.

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Capture it on your PC first and then burn it. Either way there's a A to D conversion going on and I'd rather have a dedicated capture card be doing it at lossless AVI rather than whatever the DVD recorder is doing internally. You can then convert down to whatever size:Quality:compatibility ratio you want.

 

[Rebel7254]

Well on HQ mode I can't notice any compression in the video. This may not be the case on higher quality recordings such as what is on our mini-DV tapes. But as of now I think the DVD recorder is adequate. Besides, I don't currently have a way to hook up the Beta and VHS VCR's to the computer. I know I could buy something that'll allow me to do it, but I don't see the need atm.

Do you think I could get more than 60 mins of footage on a DVD by capturing it on my PC though (lossless AVI)?

 

[DaveSimmons]

No, I have a Hauppage PVR-150 (hardware MPEG2 encoding) and it only gets about 1 hour 13 minutes in the short play mode.

Capturing lossless AVI would be something like 8-12 GB per hour, the advantage would be that you could use some multi-pass encoder to create DVD MPEG2 that looks as good as your recorder and my Hauppage using a lower average bitrate (because it figures out using an extra pass through the file when it is safe to reduce the bitrate).

I've never done that though, and don't know what software you'd use.

 

[Rebel7254]

bumpty dumpty

 

[montag451]

Maybe it is worth waiting another year or so to do it - DVD will be old hat and you'll be able to use holographic media to put all the Betamax movies onto one disc.......
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/info-tech/dn8370

 

[Rebel7254]

It may not be worth it because the beta tapes are already 20 years old and the longer I wait the more likely they'll tear up and not play right. If that happens we're just screwed. They already don't play as good as they used to. I need to just do it now.

They've been saying the same thing about blu-ray taking over everything last year..........but everybody still uses DVDs. I'm sure DVDs will fade away like everything else does, but I'm just afriad to wait until they do to get this done.

 

[doan]

4.7GB DVD-R's are cheap....Capture your tapes at the highest qulity you can on a reg 4.7 DVD-R.....then when you you can transcode them to a lower bit rate if you want to for convienient viewing with TMPGEnc or even DVD shrink.

 

[Rebel7254]

I don't want to reduce the quality at all. I'd just like a way to combine the images from two DVD+R's over to one DVD+R DL.

I downloaded DVD Shrink, but I didn't see a way to do what I just talked about. It will let you re-author a DVD that has already been made, but I didn't see where you could add files to a blank DVD. I didn't use it very long because I've been pretty busy lately, so it may still be possible. I'll have to look into it more a bit later.

 

[doan]

You can combine tracks from different DVD's with DVD shrink, but you have to rip them to your hard drive first. If your selections don't fit it will compress the video for you (audio remains untouched)

If you want menu's you'll need a DVD authoring program.

 

[Rebel7254]

I'll try that when I get some DVD+R DL media. Thanks.

I had been using HP DVD+RW's, but ran out of them yesterday. I bought a 5 pack of imation DVD+RW's, but I still had like 3 or 4 Memorex DVD+RW's already opened, so I thought I'd try those first. That turned out to be a bad choice. I played back the recorded footage on the Memorex DVD and it looked terrible. It looked even worse than SP did on the HP DVD's. I checked and made sure that it was set on HQ before I started recording. I guess Memorex just sucks for video. So I had to put more wear and tear on the Beta tape by rewinding it to the starting point again and I'll open up the imation pack later.