Re: [Nolug] VHS to DVD?

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 5:49 PM, Dave Prentice <prentice@instruction.com> wrote:
> I have an off-the-shelf VCR/DVD combo. It does a great job - upconverts the
> VHS and vastly improves the picture quality. It cost under $100 a couple
> years ago, but I think they are around $180 now.

It always depends on what you're trying to do. VCR/DVD combo units should
be good if you just need/want some basic capture; seems like a good choice
if you want 80% of the results for 20% of the pain of more elaborate methods.

VCR/DVD combo units are not for high quality output -- the result of MPEG2
compression is definitely not cleaner than the original corrected VHS source,
there will be some altogether new artifacts introduced, depending on the
recording. And Keep in mind, MPEG2/DVD is unsuitable for further editing.

H.264 at a higher bit rate is preferable for higher quality (but this
is not DVD)

In the past, I've used
Good $30 used HiFi VCR + $50 DataVideo TBC-3xxx Time base corrector
hardware found used
on some online auction site
 + $220 Grass Valley ADVC-110 (Analog to DV Firewire Bridge) - capture unit
    that can act like a DV camcorder Firewire device, when the right
DIP switches are set on the back
    (plays analog inputs to PC Firewire)
 + ~$50 nonlinear video editing software that captures from DV sources

With excellent results. But said DV output isn't so necessary,
if you have no intention of capturing a fair amount and actually
editing the video.

Firewire bridge chosen over Analog capture card, because current
versions of decent video editing software don't seem to have any
analog capture device support anymore. Apparently DV and HDV are
most commonly used for any sort of capture for editing; nowadays.

Native capture device support by your choice of software allows you
to avoid needing to manually perform file type conversions,
or needing to utilize multiple tools.

Manually futzing around with .AVI files is a pain, and re-compressing
MPEG files to
edit is worse, if you have more than a video clips to deal with.

> Dave Prentice

--
-JH
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