I'm new to this sort of thing so forgive me if this question has been asked before. I'm hoping to archive old home movies (8mm, D8, VHS, etc.) on a DVD. My question is how exactly do I go about capturing analog footage? Is it complicated? More importantly, should I expect to see a slight loss in quality after putting it on a DVD? Any assistance you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
capture card (vhs tapes)/Firewire card (digital camcorder) software (pinnacle, adobe, ulead), its fairly easy but time consuming as you are doing it in realtime, on the quality side you will only get decent quality by putting decent quality in, using the software will not improve the quality, Many people will argue that they can improve it by do this and doing that, but it bascially boils down to your orignal source. You will get decent enough viewable quality. So go and get yourself a card dependant on your camera connections/vhs connections. Pinnacle do a cheap firewire (you will need dv out on camera) card with cable with pinnalce studio 7 that lets you do editing and creates a mpg1 (vcds) or mpg2 (svcd/dvd) but has no burning software on it, (40 pounds ish) to burn it to a disc, for that you will have to upgrade to studio 8 which they do a package with a card for 90 odd pounds. For analoge avermedia do a good tv card that will let you capture from vhs/cameras using yellow, red, white connections and svhs connection, for about 39 pound ish, avermedia studio though it is bascially a tv card but its very good at caputring in mpg1, mpg2, AVI but you will need seperate burning software to put on a disc, i.e Nero, recordnow (vcds only) for dvd authoring TMPGEnc dvdauthor. Basically first i would sort out your caputring then come back here check out guides on ask for ways of putting onto or cdrs.
I have had great success capturing AVI footage from an analogue vodeo camera with an ATI All in wonder 128 Pro card. The quality is perfect. I have captured, authored, and burnt it to DVD-R using Studio 8.
