All I really want to do is move my older 8mm/VHS/Beta movies to DVD. I've read many, many web pages and advertisements regarding software and hardware. Now I'm a bit overwhelmed.
Ideally, I would like to move all my old analogy videos (with audio of course) to my PC. From their I would like to edit, cut-n-paste and put together movies - then burn to a DVD.
Do I need to have a hardware encoder as part of my video capture card? I'm under the impression that this will help keep the audio/video sync where it belongs as well as keeping th fps at 30+?
Should I use a unit that copies native MPEG-2 directly from my analog device to my PC?
Basic spec's of what I have now:
p4 3.06ghz
1gb 3400 ram
240gb serial HD
250gb ide HD(s)
GeForce FX 5600 AGP 256mb DDR
ATI 9700 Pro AGP 128mb DDR
Sony 510 DVD burner
Betamax player - with RCA video/auto & coax out.
What I really need is a non-sales person who has lots of this kinda of experience that I could email or chat with here until I could get a handle on this complex subject. Any information and suggesions would be appreciated.
I struggled with this one as well. The big problem I ran into was, as you said, trying to get a non-sales person. Even when I would go to reviews of the products, it's impossible to tell if it's an Acme employee that posted the glowing review of the Acme Video Capture Gizmo.
I tried using the video capture capabilities of my video card, but was never satisfied with the quality. I also heard bad things about the USB input devices that are available.
I ended up buying a Panasonic DME-e50 (get the 60 now though) which is a stand alone DVD recorder; kinda like a DVD VCR. It produces DVD's with no loss of quality, as well it runs everything through a digital comb filter which actually cleans up the image slightly. If I want to do video editing I use my computer and DVD Shrink to cut out the parts I don't want, then use my LG DVD burner and Record Now to create the DVD's.
I think the DVD recorder option is a good one. But I like to do really psychedelic post-production stuff so these recorders don't really suit me. If simple editing is what you want, the speed and ease of DVD recorders can't be beaten with a PC. PCs are much more flexible though, which usually means more complicated.
Your PC seem quite powerful so the problem is in deciding the catpure hardware. I had many old VHS tapes to restore onto DVD. For the analog capture I bought the Canopus ADVC-100 which is an analog video to DV converter. Since I have firewire on my PC I captured everything in DV AVIcodec. No sync issues with the SDVC-100. Don't capture in mpeg2 if you want to edit the video. You get about 4.5 minutes per gigabyte using the DV codec. Since my tapes were old and nasty (NOISE!), I bought a little video stablizer (also called video enahncer) which made the video capture much more stable. The quality of the original analog video can be a problem with many capture hardware, so one of these little boxes (which are quite cheap) go a long way.
You can then edit the video using your favourite editor (premiere, vegas, VirtualDub, etc) and then encode to mpeg2 (cce, TMPGEnc, etc). Depending on the quality of the source video, I used to use virtualdub's 'cleanup' filters to enhance the video a little. Temporal Cleaner, DeNoise, etc. There are many good enhancer filters for VirtualDub. Vegas can now import VirtualDub filters as well.
TMPGEnc DVD Author is a nice/easy software for authoring your DVD. Finally you can burn to DVD using your fav burning software.
I Use the Adaptec Video USB 2 Box to import Hi8 video to the PC. I had huge problems with video/audio sync after encoding with Sonic, but now use TMPenc to encode files, then burn through Nero. Results are brilliant, no sync probs and high quality video, well the best you can expect from Hi8. Recording from the TV through the USB box produces even better results. I have a 2.4 P4 with 512 PC3200 RAM and a 60GB mirrored array. Hope this helps.
