First time analog video capture-Which direction with hardware and software?

[DonR]

First of all thank you to all the forum contributors as I have learnt so much in a short amount of time. I’ve never created a DVD yet so please forgive me for any oh so obvious questions. I have recently purchased my first computer with a DVD burner (a notebook) so I’m keen to make a DVD of all my old family videos (VHS) but I’m not sure which direction to take and would appreciate your opinions. I’d like the quality to be as faithful to the tape as possible within my budgetary limits of around $200-300 for hardware and software. Reasonable do you think? I’m not after professional results, maybe pro-sumer?

Firstly with capture. Would I be better off to use a friends LG DVD recorder with HDD to capture tape onto DVD and then edit the DVD on the notebook or should I purchase some hardware to connect to my notebook to capture direct to HDD?

If the latter is a preferred way to go then is it better to get one of those devices that are connected via USB2.0 and encode to mpeg2 on the fly or is it better to get one of those devices that digitise to DV onto my HDD and edit DV to mpeg2? Also is PCMCIA a better choice than USB2.0? Either way what recommendended products should I look at?

Lastly, what software do you recommend for either scenario that will let me edit/author/add some titles effects etc? Are those one click all in a box packages worthwile?

My notebook specs are:

Toshiba Satellite M40 Notebook
Pentium M 1.86GHz ‘Sonoma’
60Gb HDD
1Gb RAM
with Firewire and USB 2.0 ports

Many thanks,

DonR

[ronnylov]

If you are going to edit your video then you may want to capture in DV format because most NLE software is optimized for that. You can buy a device that converts analogue video to DV over firewire and connect it to the firewire port on your notebook. Edit in DV format and then compress to mpeg2 as your final step before DVD authoring.

The other options you mention will work too. It may be more convenient to capture directly to mpeg2 if you not are going to edit your captures. A PCMCIA device for lossless captures in huffyuv format may give the best quality but it requires huge hard disk space. If you capture to mjpeg with high quality setting you may get better quality than DV but smaller file sizes than huffyuv.

I have never done any captures to a notebook so I don't know what kind of PCMCIA devices you can get. I would probably buy a DV capture device and capture through firewire if I was going to do it with a notebook.

[ammck55]

I have a Toshiba P25 laptop that I've captured a lot of Mini DV footage with, but I've never used it for VHS cap's. Most of the lower-end Mini DV cam's offer "pass through" capture, meaning that you can run your VHS material through the mini and capture to your hard drive. Here's some copied promotional text from a cam that has this functionality:

The camcorder analog inputs feature a built-in Analog to Digital converter that will convert your analog video/audio to a digital signal that can either be recorded to tape or passed through the i.Link interface to a compatible computer.

My laptop came with a 40GB hard drive--I purchased an external drive to archive my video files to, but a less expensive solution to this would be buying a big SATA drive and housing it in an enclosure, effectively turning it into an "external" drive. Even with a 60GB hard drive, you'll soon find that digital video requires a lot of storage space. In order to keep from constantly processing your footage before capturing more, I'd suggest an external solution of some nature. :)

ronnylov hit it pretty square--you can basically capture to your laptop with an inexpensive Mini DV; hardware capture cards that will capture directly to MPEG2 on-the-fly are beyond me, the only real knowledge I have of them is that they're expensive.

Editing? You'll find differing advice, the best thing I could offer is to download demo's of a couple of different programs and see what works for you. The Vegas 5 suite has gotten a lot of buzz lately, and there's Adobe, U-Lead, Pinnacle, etc.....DVD-lab is affordable and well-thought of, as well.

Now, I'll do what I should have done in the first place and send this over to the Capture forum where you can get some good "looks". :) Good luck!

ammck55

[DonR]

Thanks for your input guys. This is an example of what I was thinking about.

http://www.pinnaclesys.com/ProductPage_n.asp?Product_ID=2252&Langue_ID=7

Has anyone got any experience with this type of device?

Thanks 7 rgds,

DonR