risteli
4th September 2006, 12:31
My first message in this forum, so first of all a hello to all old and new forum population.
I'm in the process of capturing lots of 10 years old VHS family recording, for a total material in the 70+ hours. The quality is mediocre at best - cheap, low quality VHS tapes created from VHS-C sources, with parts in LP and parts from 3rd generation copies, hence requiring a lot of filtering and editing before being ready for DVD authoring. And as I'm trying to do a good job and leave something worthy seeing, editing and authoring takes a lot of time too - and it's the fun part of the job, too, so I indulge :)
After months of trying different setups, software, hardware and all, I finally found a combination of the above that really satisfies me. The only problem is that processing tapes this way eats enormous amounts of time, VHS tapes are degrading, kids are growing and my wife is pressing me to see the recordings - all this while my own free time is not growing at all and must be shared with the above mentioned family for all life activities :)
Trying to find a solution that doesn't require new software or hardware acquisition in the short term, I'm thinking about a temporary solution to solve some of the problems: I'd capture the video, clean it and instead of editing and authoring I'd store in on miniDV tapes using my current camera. This should take half the time when compared to DVD, it would minimize the VHS degradation problem, let the kid and wife see it ... as soon as it would all be on minidv tapes, I could then recapture, edit and author as if it was a normal DV shot, but without fearing heavy degradation.
How does the plan sound, anything I should know when capturing with DVs instead of DVDs as final destination ?
And one more point. As all shots are nicely logged on paper, would it be possible to re-encode real (as in, when it was shot, not recorded) datecode on the DVs ? I found no way to add metadata with Avisynth beside the normal audio/video streams. I know there are a couple of tools able to burn the datecode on AVI DV files, but none I know of can do it on segments of that AVI, while in Avisynth I have the complete list from frame to frame of all the AVI parts. The alternative here would be to create a separate AVI for every capture, and then use the tools to set the datecode, but if I can avoid it ...
I'm in the process of capturing lots of 10 years old VHS family recording, for a total material in the 70+ hours. The quality is mediocre at best - cheap, low quality VHS tapes created from VHS-C sources, with parts in LP and parts from 3rd generation copies, hence requiring a lot of filtering and editing before being ready for DVD authoring. And as I'm trying to do a good job and leave something worthy seeing, editing and authoring takes a lot of time too - and it's the fun part of the job, too, so I indulge :)
After months of trying different setups, software, hardware and all, I finally found a combination of the above that really satisfies me. The only problem is that processing tapes this way eats enormous amounts of time, VHS tapes are degrading, kids are growing and my wife is pressing me to see the recordings - all this while my own free time is not growing at all and must be shared with the above mentioned family for all life activities :)
Trying to find a solution that doesn't require new software or hardware acquisition in the short term, I'm thinking about a temporary solution to solve some of the problems: I'd capture the video, clean it and instead of editing and authoring I'd store in on miniDV tapes using my current camera. This should take half the time when compared to DVD, it would minimize the VHS degradation problem, let the kid and wife see it ... as soon as it would all be on minidv tapes, I could then recapture, edit and author as if it was a normal DV shot, but without fearing heavy degradation.
How does the plan sound, anything I should know when capturing with DVs instead of DVDs as final destination ?
And one more point. As all shots are nicely logged on paper, would it be possible to re-encode real (as in, when it was shot, not recorded) datecode on the DVs ? I found no way to add metadata with Avisynth beside the normal audio/video streams. I know there are a couple of tools able to burn the datecode on AVI DV files, but none I know of can do it on segments of that AVI, while in Avisynth I have the complete list from frame to frame of all the AVI parts. The alternative here would be to create a separate AVI for every capture, and then use the tools to set the datecode, but if I can avoid it ...