Hello everyone,
I'm new to the video capturing world and would appreciate some expert info.
I have hundreds VHS tapes that i have recorded over the years, mostly from the 80's-90's and would like to save the nostalgic commercials and tv shows on them. plus i have about 40 Hi8 cassettes of home movies which i would have to achieve on better quality dvd's. i know its going to take a while to convert all of the tapes, so i bought 4 PC computers and Dazzle usb capture units to convert 24hr a day. i have researched a bit on this site and google on which software i should use, but i would prefer if someone can tell me what would be the best with what i need to do.
Basically, most of the tapes have junk on them and would just like to save most of the content. so i was thinking of just letting the tapes record in full onto the pc's and just quickly edit out the junk and save the stuff i need onto dvds.
Which free software will let me edit and save the most content, how much can i save onto a dvd without sacrificing the quality since the VHS quality is already lacking and which format?
If it's being captured as mpeg-2 then Mpg2Cut2 will let you select the clips you want to keep.
To convert the file to DVD format, you have to use an authoring program like DVD Flick.
If the caps are mpeg-2 compliant, you may be able to let the program copy the video without re-encoding (which is faster).
A standard DVD blank has a nominal capacity of two hours running time for DVD movie format video.
Another great method in terms of separating clips is VirtualDub. I know it reads AVI files, but I'm not sure on whether it will read others. But you can cut out segments of video, then do a "direct stream copy" of those segments. What this does is just copy the parts that you select to a new file, without reencoding them, so the process only takes a few seconds, and the quality will be exactly the same as the original file.
