Video Capture Recommendation

[BigLar]

I have a tub of old family videos, beta, VHS, SVHS, VHS-C, and DV. You name it, I got it.

So its time to transfer them to a hard drive on my Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit machine. I've got the various recorders/players set up and I started transferring them through a Dazzle DVC 100. (I'll do the DV through a Firewire.) I can get it to work, though not through the S-Video plug, but the output looks only so so on a 24" monitor. It'll probably look pretty bad on a 45" TV.

I don't remember the video looking so poor when I played it directly to a TV, so I'm thinking I'm losing resolution in the DVC 100. Does that make sense?

Does anybody have any recommendations for replacement video capture hardware to add to my rig that would preserve whatever resolution is coming out of the players?

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

 

[lsv]

If your monitor is at say 1920x1080 and you play video which is say... 720x480p it'll end up looking terrible when stretched up to full screen on the monitor. Try the video at default resolution and compare.

There may also have be some degradation in your magnetic storage over time.

add - The Dazzle looks to be a bit of a piece of shit :\ - http://www.videohelp.com/capturecards/dazzle-dvc-100/209

But that guy 'Jake' seem helpful;
I found the best thing to do is always capture at 720x480 and let other software scale it back to SVCD CVD or whatever you're authoring to. It seems to be more work for it to do lower resolutions, so for the small savings in file size it's not worth it. The quality of 720x480 captures tends to be excellent, it does justice to as good as svideo can be.

 

[BigLar]

Well, I'm inclined to agree on the POS for the DVC100 (which I got from a Woot Off long ago), I just don't know why. (Remember, I'm new to the video editing thing.) The 720 x 480 default capture seems to be in line with Jake's recommendation.

From the looks of the Wikipedia article on S-VHS it would seem I'd be OK even including the DV tapes (but I'll Firewire them in from the camcorder):

* 350×240 (250 lines): Video CD
* 330×480 (250 lines): Umatic, Betamax, VHS, Video8
* 400×480 (300 lines): Super Betamax, Betacam (professional)
* 440×480 (330 lines): analog broadcast
* 560×480 (420 lines): LaserDisc, S-VHS, Hi8
* 670×480 (500 lines): Enhanced Definition Betamax
* 720×480 (480 lines): DVD, miniDV, Digital8, DVCAM (professional), DVCPRO (professional), DVCPRO 50 (professional)

As far as the magnetic media deterioration, that's a tough subject. I've already had some old 8mm films converted, some of which were in bad shape, so I figure I can't lose too much by going to magnetic media. Since the stuff will be family archive material, the strategy is:

1. Store on RAID 1.
2. Store in cloud storage too.
3. Give adult children 1TB external drive (or bigger) with archive for storage "off-site"
4. Recopy personal RAID 1 onto external HDD every year or so.

Kinda over the top, but if the images are lost, well, then they're lost.

Interesting question, what format will be in use in 2070?

Any recommendations for a DVC100 replacement?

 

[nenforcer]

I am by no means and expert on this but I bought a Huappage WinTV-HVR 1600 PCI and it has the analog video capture (I use yellow composite VHS) with hardware MPEG-2 compression.

It captures the video pretty good quality as a .TS (Transport Stream) and then has the option of encoding this as an MPEG-II file.

My troubles have been in trying to get the MPEG-II file to burn to DVD without reencoding and loss of quality.

 

[Modelworks]

Keep in mind that all of the formats you are converting are interlaced and depending on what process you use to de-interlace them will greatly effect the quality of the video.

This site explains the de-interlacing process very well with lots of examples.
http://www.100fps.com/


The best way to capture analog video is to capture it as RAW video without any encoding. This takes a ton of space but leaved you with the best possible capture. You can then edit it and re-encode it to something more manageable .

You can use any capture solution that can handle video without the card using some sort of native compression like mpeg2. This is the card I like , it sold for $20 last year but I don't see it in stock anywhere anymore , may find one if you search.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...441&CatId=1425

 

[nenforcer]

Yeah I tried to go the RAW route but my 1 hour VHS tape was ballooning into a 100GB file which I didn't have room for.

I added another hard drive and split it into 2 partitions of 75GB each which still isn't enough so I am sticking with my 7GB DVD size files to save some time.

Anyways this is a whole 'nother thread!

 

[tweakboy]

You can try Sony SoundForge .. gl this is top of line pro editing.. gl