VHS to DVD

[Vance McNeil]

I have an 8500DV I want to convert some VHS tapes to DVD.

I would like to know opinions as the best ways to do this.

What are the prefered softwares/options for importing/capturing? Do I have
to use the ATI TV/VCR to capture through the composite in? It seems to drop
a lot of frames.
What do people generally prefer for editing? (For my purposes, I want to cut
it up into chapters/scene selections.)

TIA

 

[Alan Shepherd]

Look up:
www.dvdrhelp.com
alt.video.dvd.authoring

Also look up a method of capturing Video WITHOUT dropped frames, this is the
worst possible fault with the VHS -> DVD route going.

There are many methods that can be explored - and using .avi's is one of
them, also look-up the possibility of recording at high bit-rate Mpeg1 with
larger sized frames than VCD, it does'nt have to be 720 x 524.

 

[Ken Maltby]

I have an 8500DV I want to convert some VHS tapes to DVD.

I would like to know opinions as the best ways to do this.

What are the prefered softwares/options for importing/capturing? Do I have
to use the ATI TV/VCR to capture through the composite in? It seems to drop
a lot of frames.
What do people generally prefer for editing? (For my purposes, I want to cut
it up into chapters/scene selections.)

TIA

I have had some good results using the Adaptec "VIDEOh! PCI
video converter kit" with the downloaded Snazzi* Movie Mill
capture program.

If you want to play it on your PC, just use the "file" source
feature of any software DVD player (I like PowerDVD) or
Windows Media Player.

As this is in MPEG; editing is pretty much limited to cutting
off the begining and ends of a captured clip, but since you can
control the source (VHS tape) you can make any number of small
captured files. The files/clips well be put togather (with chapter
marks if you want) during authoring (SVCD or DVD).

I use TMPEGnc DVD Author for the MPEG2 files I have
captured. The latest version includes a burning plugin ( but
I havn't tried it yet - I just use Nero) Works quite a lot better
than MyDVD4, IMHO.

There are two great results from using this approach,

1. No audio sync issues, the PCI card encodes both
audio and video at the same time.

2. There is no need for rendering prior to authoring a DVD
or SVCD.

Luck;
Ken

 

[Vance McNeil]

No replies?

 

[Chimera]

No replies?

VHS to DVD is a fairly standard conversion, albeit not the easiest or
quickest.
There are many different software & hardware tools you can use to do this,
hardware encoders are the easiest, but most expensive. The method I use is
more 'budget', which means I chose time over expense in the trade off, but
thats not to say the results are not as good.

You'll need some sort of analog input device such as a tv tuner card with
composite/svideo input, or a video card with analog capture. The next step
is to capture the video, which is too dense to go into in a short post.
There are many good sites and posts that cover how to capture analog a/v.
To convert the captured file to mpeg for making DVDs I use a program called
TMGEnc, which is available as shareware, and then Nero to burn the disk.
The whole process takes many hours, you'll need plenty of hard disk space
and a fast computer. Good luck.

Some sites worth looking at for more information:
www.doom9.org
www.dvdrhelp.com
http://www.lukesvideo.com/

 

[Vance McNeil]

Thanks for the reply Chimera.
The ATI AIW 8500DV does have analog in as well as s-video and Digita Video
(firewire).

However, except for DV, it seems that the only app that can capture the
analog in is MMC (the ATI MultiMedia Centre app that comes with the
hardware). I was hoping someone could offer an alternative to this and show
me I was wrong.

I am looking to get a 100+GB HD soon hoping that using two HDs on seperate
IDE channels along with a huge swape file will make a difference.

I will look into TMGEnc, thanx!

 

[Vance McNeil]

Cybrow, thank you for your reply.
I have seen the tutorial for the AIW at DVDR Help and am unsatisfied with
ATI's MMC. I was hoping I could find an alternative.

Doom9 cannot be displayed. Is it me, or is the site down?

 

[Ken Maltby]

No replies?

I guess this didn't make it before:

I have had some good results using the Adaptec "VIDEOh! PCI
video converter kit" with the downloaded Snazzi* Movie Mill
capture program. (The older Version 2.0.260 works better
against Macrovision)

As this is in MPEG; editing is pretty much limited to cutting
off the begining and ends of a captured clip, but since you can
control the source (VHS tape) you can make any number of small
captured files. The files/clips well be put togather (with chapter
marks if you want) during authoring (SVCD or DVD).

I use TMPEGnc DVD Author for the MPEG2 files I have
captured. The latest version includes a burning plugin ( but
I havn't tried it yet - I just use Nero) Works quite a lot better
than MyDVD4, IMHO. (But MyDVD 4 comes free with the
card)

There are two great results from using this approach,

1. No audio sync issues, the PCI card encodes both
audio and video at the same time.

2. There is no need for rendering prior to authoring a DVD
or SVCD.

Luck;
Ken

 

[John Hall]

Hey Vance;

I'm in the process of doing this for all of my VHS tapes. I originally
bought a dedicated capture device called the Dazzle DVC II. It consisted of
a PCI capture card which converts the analogue video to the MPEG 2 format
and store it on my hard drive, and an interface device to which I could
attach my camcorder or VCR. (DVD is essentially MPEG 2 video and sound).
The device is designed specifically for use with analogue video cameras and
to do what you want to do. The only problem with it is that you have to
route the sound through the sound card and then the video and sound is
melded together in the MPEG 2 file. In a very short time this results in
the sound being out of sync with the video. If you intend to go the
dedicated capture card route, then get one that takes both the sound and the
video together in the making of the MPEG 2 video file and then you will not
have the sound sync problem. I believe Pinnacle makes such a capture card
and the latest Dazzle capture devices use firewire to capture both sound and
video together. When you capture video you push one hell of a lot of
information down the pipe and it is important to have a device that will
handle it smoothly. I'm not sure how well the AIW cards can do this. In
the past they did a pretty poor job.

Having said all that, I now use my digital video camera to capture my VHS
tapes. I bought the camera without knowing that it could be used for this
purpose and it does it beautifully. I have a Canon ZR60. I attached the
output from a VCR to my camera and the camera is in turn attached to my
computer using firewire. I play the tape to the camera, the camera converts
it to MPEG 2 and stores the resulting file on my hard drive. No sound sync
problems whatsoever.

I use Sonic MyDVD software to do the capture, Vegas Video 4 to do the
editing and final rendering of the MPEG 2 movie file, and then Ulead DVD
Workshop to actually setup and produce the final DVD. There are alternative
softwares out there for this work, but the consensus on the net when I
checked was for Vegas Video and Ulead DVD Workshop for ease of use and the
best results.

Good luck, it's a lot of work and time consuming.

JK

 

[Barry Watzman]

I will tell you the absolute best way to do it. But you probably won't
like it.

Get a Sony Digital-8 camcorder with the A-to-D "pass through" feature.
You can tell these models by the fact that they can PLAY analog Hi-8
tapes. These camcorders can either play an analog Hi-8 tape OR they can
take a video input (S-Video or composite with stereo audio) and output
it as digital video through their firewire port. You will need a
firewire port on the computer, I use the one on my Creative Labs Auidgy
Platinum's "Live Drive", but you have one on the 8500 DV also.

You will need software to do the video capture, there are tons of
products that support this. For simplicity, cost and ability to do the
whole job very quickly and very easily with a minimal learning curve, I
like Pinnacle Expression. But I have to warn you, it's a buggy product
that can be difficult to get working right, and my feelings about it are
a "love-hate" relationship. There is no other product that is as easy
to use (after you get it installed and working right) and as
straightforward, but at the same time it can be difficult to get it
installed and working right, and while it does about 90% of the job with
spectacular ease and minimal learning curve, there are a number of
things that you MIGHT want to do that it just does not do at all.

There are lots of products that have more features, but they are FAR
more complex and harder to use, and NONE of them have ALL of the
features that you want.

One other comment, you can do a good job of simple capture and editing
with Windows Movie Maker that comes with Windows and it's free and you
already have it. But it doesn't have DVD authoring. Like I said, there
are a dozen product from Pinnacle, Ulead, Roxio (MGI), Microsoft, and
more, but NONE of them does everything best (or at all), and for someone
just starting, Pinnalce Expression is a very good basic, beginning tool
that does the most basic stuff well and easily and straightforwardly
very well -- once you get it installed and running properly, which is
sometimes easy and sometimes extremely difficult.

As to why to use the Sony Digital-8 camcorder to do the conversion from
A-to-D and the capture: There is NOTHING that even comes close to this
method in terms of easo of use and quality of conversion. The camcorder
has special hardware circuits that are HIGHLY optimized to do this
function, just this function, and to do it with utmost high quality.
I've tried other devices, and nothing else works as well and as easily.
This is the way to go. There may be other digital camcorders besides
Sony or besides Digital-8 that have this feature (pass-through A-to-D
conversion), but I'm not certain of that. You can get a suitable unit
on E-Bay for $200 and up. Be aware that while most Sony Digital-8
camcorder have this feature, some of the low-end models do not. The
tipoff is that the models that can PLAY analog Hi-8 tapes have this feature.

 

[Barry Watzman]

You don't need a large swap file, nor do you need two disk drives, but
you do need a lot of disk space, because the captured digital video
takes about 14 gigs per hour of video. Also, the capture partition MUST
be NTFS, because FAT32 has a 4 gig limit per file, and that's only about
20 minutes.

Also, understand that the final encode of the video to create and burn
the DVD is tremedously processor intensive and time consuming. You will
need an additional 5 gig of disk space (but NOT in the swap file), and
it takes 5 to 14 HOURS to do this, during which the computer is not
useable for anything else (typically, people start this and let it run
overnight). Obviously the fastest CPU possible should be used, with at
least 256 megs of fast memory (Rambus or one of the faster grades of
DDR, but definitely NOT plain old SDRAM).

My own setup has a 200 gig hard drive configured "dual boot" as follows:

C: - 8 gigs, Win98SE (FAT32)
D: - 16 gigs, WinXP (FAT32)
E: - 32 gigs, all data for both 98SE and XP)("My Documents" for both OS'
is here)(FAT32)
F: - 32 gigs, a "spare" data partion (has 18 gigs of digital music) (FAT32)
G: - 32 gigs, another "spare" data partition (FAT32)
H: - 80 gigs, dedicated to digital video capture and editing (NTFS)

Note that there are some special considerations and cautions in using
any IDE hard drive larger than 137 gigs with regards to any partitions
that cross or are beyond the 137 boundry barrier. If you don't install
this properly, writes to or beyond 137 gigs will "wrap" from 137 gigs to
the start of the hard drive and overwrite the first partition (drive C
instead of continuing to fill the partitions in and beyond which the 137
gig partition occurs, thus corrupting the drive and destroying it's
contents. Windows XP does not support drives over 137 gigs, or spanning
the 137 gig barrier, UNLESS you have SP1 installed AND IN ADDITION you
manually make an additonal registry modification that is documented in
the Microsoft knowledgebase. Win98 doesn't support such partitions at
all, period, no matter what you do. However, if you make such
partitions NTFS, Win98 can't see them anyway, so it doesn't matter.

 

[Vance McNeil]

Again, in the NG instead of email:

Thanx very much for your input and time. You've given me lots to look into
and a reason to go out and spend that ridiculous sum of money I've secretly
been dying to spend ;-)