Multiple video card capture - Bulk video encoding, please Advise - Newbie

[DumDum]

We have a bulk of HQ videos (most on BETACAM & U-MATIC tapes, a few on DVCAM, Pal/Ntsc SD).

We wanna to backup all of these old videos on DVD-R.

Cards with on borard MPEG-2 encoder let's us to capture video w/o use CPU in encoding, software like Beyond TV can capture from upto 10 sources on the same machine.

Which software and hardware conbination should I use to capture from 4 tapes at the same time (saving Closed Captions as subtitles), and doing that in a highly automated way (we have a huge library to convert, so we need to work on many tapes at the same time), and finally add multiple audio tracks (multiple translatios/comments/etc).

We must to preserve the Broadcast quality of the videos, we have a lot of money to do that, but we want to save as much money as possible on this work.

We considering some cards an software from canopus and pinnacle, but we are not sure about the quality, and the capabilities, also the multiple channer audio sinc after (alternative audio source are on separate tapes) enconing is a possible nightmare.

We are capable to write scripts for scripting enabled applications like V.Dub, but we don't know if we can use VDub in multiple sesions w/ multiple cards.

I'm not so fluent wrintg english so sorry for any mistake.

[mic]

My own opinions...

Multiple sources is common but recording more then one tape at a time would be the problem. I think it would be easier and cheaper to implement more, lower quality PCs to do the digital conversion -- one per tape playback. The problem I think would be limits in Windows (can only play one video at a time), requiring external boxes for broadcast which can be expensive.

I don't think you'd want hardware mpg2, as it limits your quality quite a bit, and the cpu hit now-days isn't that great anyway (maybe 10%). To maintain your original quality I'd also suggest a 2nd step encoding to final format after capture.

Saving closed caption stream I think you might have to go to a custom software solution, but it should be fairly easy. Using software drivers in Graphedit it's possible to save the text with timing & converting to sub format is trivial. You'd just need someone to write something that would use the correct filters during capture.

Syncing everything together prior to or during DVD layout creation is also minor, but would take hands-on... don't think that could be fully automated.

All in all I think I'd consider approaching this through Microsoft WinMedia -- I think they've done the most with commercial production of this sort. I think you'd have best success capturing CC, video, & multiple audio in one session using their solutions, and they have I think best control and scripting support to do the most automation.

Some will not like Winmedia because of it's common use similar to mp4. However, the format is easily capable of theater quality, and unlike mpg2, can be edited without recompressing everything. This would give a master with synced subs, multi audio tracks, and video ready to be transcoded to DVD, or some authoring programs use winmedia as is. If nothing else, this is an area Microsoft seems very interested in, and you might find the greatest amount of free, pro level help.

Capture hardware is opinions -- would suggest choosing that last after settle on everything else. Some works better with different formats, and there are also more pro brands available then what you've listed.