Ron42
28th June 2005, 20:47
Since you are planning on putting the videos on DVD in the future, by far the easiest and less time consuming way would be to use a standalone dvd recorder.
I've spent about a year now trying various hardware and software methods to back up all of my old video. I have a good mixture of VHS, mini-VHS, Hi-8, and more recently Digital 8mm. The only advice I feel qualified to offer on this thread is that you need to make sure you have a capture method that maintains video quality. I tried a lot of different methods using analog capture cards, and spent hours burning raw capture to stacks of DVD, but the quality was so poor, I ended up throwing them out. My final solution was a Sony HandyCam Digital-8 with a Hi-8 playback circuit. Using firewire (USB lost frames), I was able to capture everything to AVI as fast as I could switch tapes. That added up to over 500G, though, which would be pretty costly to burn to DVD as uncompressed AVI.
Along the same lines, I used a Sanyo DRW-1000 DVR to copy my VHS and mini-VHS. But it puts a cruddy green menu on, and chapter marks every 10 minutes. I can copy these with DVD Shrink, but what I would like to do is put proper menus and chapters in. I tried importing the VOBs into NeroVision, but rather than a project with a single title, it breaks these VOBs into 18M pieces, calling each a title. Any attempt to put them back together results in the audio muting after each 18M section, and then 3 black frames, and then it starts normal playback again. Sanyo says that they use no copy protection. Does anyone have any ideas on what is causing this or how I might get around it.
I've spent about a year now trying various hardware and software methods to back up all of my old video. I have a good mixture of VHS, mini-VHS, Hi-8, and more recently Digital 8mm. The only advice I feel qualified to offer on this thread is that you need to make sure you have a capture method that maintains video quality. I tried a lot of different methods using analog capture cards, and spent hours burning raw capture to stacks of DVD, but the quality was so poor, I ended up throwing them out. My final solution was a Sony HandyCam Digital-8 with a Hi-8 playback circuit. Using firewire (USB lost frames), I was able to capture everything to AVI as fast as I could switch tapes. That added up to over 500G, though, which would be pretty costly to burn to DVD as uncompressed AVI.
Along the same lines, I used a Sanyo DRW-1000 DVR to copy my VHS and mini-VHS. But it puts a cruddy green menu on, and chapter marks every 10 minutes. I can copy these with DVD Shrink, but what I would like to do is put proper menus and chapters in. I tried importing the VOBs into NeroVision, but rather than a project with a single title, it breaks these VOBs into 18M pieces, calling each a title. Any attempt to put them back together results in the audio muting after each 18M section, and then 3 black frames, and then it starts normal playback again. Sanyo says that they use no copy protection. Does anyone have any ideas on what is causing this or how I might get around it.