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[KingSparta]

I Had A VHS To DVD, But It Is Not Working Correctly Not Sure Why.

But I Have Some Vintage 8mm Film That Some Years Ago Was Converted To VHS It Does Not Look Too Bad, But I Am Wondering What Would Be The Best Way To Convert It To A Media File Without Losing Any Detail. I Want To Preserve The Quality I Have Left And Put It On The Web For Everyone To View.

The Film Is Of The Texas Tower #4 Before It Fell And Killed Everyone On Board back In January 15, 1961

My Original Thought Is To Copy To DVD Then Maybe Use A DVD Ripper And Rip It To A Media File AVI Or Other Format. I Am Not Sure What Format Would Be Best And Or What Program Since I Have Never Done This Before.

Any Ideas Would Be Helpful.

[MajorTomKY]

I have a similar project, I have a ton of VHS tapes I'm converting to DIvx on my computer to share on the network with my HTPC. The solution I am using is a Plextor ConvertX PX-M402U. It attaches to the USB port. The VHS plugs into it and the Plextor converts the video to a DivX stream which the computer captures to file. I get pretty good results. I followed a suggestion from on the net to capture at DVD resolution as it actually reduced any interlace problems and it helped the video quality. It comes with ULEad video studio 8 SE to capture the stream. DO NOT buy the Studio 11 upgrade as they took out the feature of capturing from the Plextor ! Although I do admit that 11 is kind of handy for other things so I'm not completely burned by purchasing it.  There are some other capture cards out there but this one was reasonably priced.

[benn600]

I have got to ping in.  I've had a ton of experience here converting ~100 DVDs for my family and some for other people.  I highly recommend Adobe Premiere Elements over anything else.  I have used versions 1 and 2.  Two has more features but seems to have a few issues.  I think they are both very reliable and useful, though.

If you are archiving your home movies you really should not save them in any lower quality than you can afford because these copies can eventually become your only copy.  I personally spent weeks over a few months.  I had an excellent and fast system going.  I imported the VHS through a higher-end VCR through my Sony miniDV camera (passed analog through firewire) and then I caught 95% of the camera start/stops and added a fade to black with some space.  Finally, I added a nice menu with as much information as I could gather and burnt them to TWO dvds.  I labeled them A and B.  I then took two identical 200-Disc holders (Case Logic) and I now keep the same DVDs in both cases.  This allows me to keep the second set off site.  I had purchased around 300 HP DVDs and just recently bought another 300 at Staples.

I have always used the HP DVD-R media.  I just started with it and continue using it now.  It is slightly more expensive than some of the cheaper media and it seems to be very reliable.

I also plan to make a third copy, C, in another 2 years or so.  I figure if I wait a few years and make another copy, then I will have a fresh DVD copy to help protect against the potential for DVDs to break down over time.  Oh, and I keep them all on my server as VIDEO_TS folders.  So the only encoding, after A->D, was for the Mpeg 2 DVD.  I know that DVDs provide better quality than VHS so that satisfied me.

Finally, I made a big effort to keep my discs under 74 minutes.  The reasoning is because in Premiere Elements, it shows the bit rate.  Once you exceed 74 minutes it starts decreasing below 8 Mb/second.  I want to preserve as much quality as I can and it IS very noticeable if the bit rate is dropped to 5 Mb or below.  You can add up to 2 hours of content but the quality is significantly worse.

Plus, VHS tapes have fuzz and other artifacts that require more data to encode.  I'm very pleased with my conversion process and am essentially complete.  We do find a VHS tape from time to time and we continue creating more content with our miniDV camera and my method continues to work well today.

For appearance, I use a thin felt-tip marker to write the title.  I get three lines.  Then, I take a much thicker marker and write the A or B on the shiny portion.  They look very nice and clean.

Some filters were added to certain videos to brighten them up and enhance their appearance when necessary, however, I tried to avoid too much adjustment.

[chicotower]

The only thing I can think of is if your cable TV provider changed any of the codes or settings, you might have to contact them for help in getting all of your devices to communicate with each other. Could you also have had a power outage while you were gone? This has happened to us and we had to have everything reset afterwards. These are the only things I can think of; I am definitely no expert on this subject.

[dcwebman]

Years ago after using various video capture devices and having poor results, I ended up with the same solution that benn mentioned. I needed to upgrade my Hi-8 camcorder anyway so changing to a miniDV that allowed passthru via firewire was a no-brainer. I bought a Canon which was the lowest priced at the time that allowed this functionality and it has worked great. I used to use buggy versions of Pinnacle Studio but switched to Premiere Elements last year after reading glowing reviews and have been very happy with that. I still have on my to do list to convert the rest of my VHS and S-VHS tapes and will get to it someday. Then I can get rid of my S-VHS VCR. 

[glynor]

King -

For converting, you'll need a piece of hardware to get the video onto your computer.  There are a few ways to do this and a few different types of video digitizers...  One caveat to be aware of, many cheaper Analog<->Digital converter boxes and (most consumer-level) camcorders do not lock the audio and video sync, which causes them to drift over time.  This means that if you have one of these devices and you are ingesting any material longer than 30 minutes or so, the audio will not match the video and it'll get progressively worse over time.  So, be aware of that...  I've had VERY good luck with the Canopus (now Grass Valley) line of Analog<->Digital converter boxes.

There are basically three types of converter boxes that you'd want to consider for a project like this:

1) TV Tuner Card with hardware MPEG-2 encoder -- something like a ATI 550 Pro based card or a Hauppage WinTV card.  This would be a versatile choice because you can also use it for watching TV on your PC.  However, they typically have the lowest quality of the available converters.

2) "Pro" or External Hardware MPEG-2 encoder -- something like a Plextor ConvertX or a Grass Valley Firecoder.  These are similarly versatile, and sometimes have much more advanced features than the "TV Tuner purposed" PCI cards.  Something like the Firecoder is going to offer very high quality MPEG-2 encoding (considerably better than the cheaper Plextor, ATI, or Hauppage options).  The good thing about direct MPEG-2 encoding is that it saves time if all you want is to send the video directly to DVD.  MPEG-2 video files can be more difficult to edit, however.  If you are going to do serious editing of the content, using a better "editing" codec might be a better option.

3) External Hardware DV Encoder (Analog<->Digital Encoder) -- something like the Grass Valley ADVC110 or ADVC300.  These types of boxes are going to encode to a much higher-quality (than MPEG-2) DV codec, and allow you to use a Non-Linear Editing application (such as Avid, Adobe Premier, Final Cut Pro, etc) to edit the video together.  You'd then have to use that app or a separate MPEG-2 encoder to export the video back out to MPEG-2 in order to burn the video to DVD.  Many of these boxes (such as the ADVC300 linked above) have automated "cleaning" features that can really help to easily fix up old video.

With that said, you'll also need software to record the video.  Many of these options also include some form of video editing software.  There are lots of options on this front, but to some degree you are going to be limited by what you get.

[benn600]

But if you have an external hardware MPG2 encoder and then burn to DVD, aren't you re-encoding again?  I like the miniDV camera idea because it transfers nearly untouched video over firewire.

[glynor]

But if you have an external hardware MPG2 encoder and then burn to DVD, aren't you re-encoding again?

Not unless your DVD Authoring application is extremely stupid.  There is a difference between encoding and muxing.  When you import a DVD-compliant MPEG-2 file into most DVD Authoring applications I've used, it detects it and doesn't re-encode the video, it just muxes it into the proper BUP/IFO/VOB structure needed for DVD playback.

Also, a quality hardware MPEG-2 encoder will generally do a MUCH, MUCH better job at encoding the video than most cheap software encoders would.  Now, if you spend $4k on your software encoder, then you might have a different story, but... 

MiniDV camcorders certainly do not transfer the video untouched (or even "mostly" untouched).  MiniDV camcorders encode the video to DV, which is a lossy codec (a fairly high-bitrate one, but a fairly lossy one), and when you make the DVD then it is transcoded to MPEG-2.  More damaging however is that using a DV --> DVD workflow also requires a color-space conversion, which causes pretty severe artifacts and loss of color fidelity and resolution.  DVD uses the 4:2:0 color space, but DV uses 4:1:1.  That means you end up with 1/8 of the original color "resolution" in the end when you go through an intermediary DV codec on the way to MPEG-2.  Going directly to MPEG-2 at least preserves the color space end-to-end, so you're only limited to 1/4 of the "color resolution", and there are no rounding errors introduced (plus you don't introduce any unnecessary DV artifacts).

If you don't know what I mean about color spaces, do some research on video YUV color spaces.  DV --> DVD is generally a no-no.  HDV is a much better option, even if you are going to downsample it to Standard Def for DVD, simply because it doesn't go through a color space conversion then.

To put it in terms of audio files, which might be easier to understand... Going through a MiniDV camcorder is like doing this with an audio file:

Say you start out with an uncompressed 48kHz, stereo wav file, and your goal is to convert it to a 48 kHz, stereo MP3.  However, instead of going directly to MP3, you first compress it to AAC at 44.1 kHz in mono, but you do it at 400 kbps (very high for an AAC).  And only then do you take that AAC file and compress it to MP3, resampling it back to 48 kHz and "faking" the stereo signal.  Even though the bitrate is very high on the AAC file, you've still thrown out all kinds of audio data in the process.

The same thing happens with running through a DV intermediary step.  It does allow you to more easily edit the video though, as MPEG-2 is a terrible editing format (the NLEs are getting better at it now though because HDV is really just fancy High-Def MPEG-2).

[MajorTomKY]

Alot of info has bounced around this thread but I don't think you ever mentioned exactly what you meant by 'VHS to Computer' ?

Is it your plan to store DVD format files on your hard drive?

Or were you planning on .AVI or god forbid WMV ?

How many you want to convert certainly affects the decision. It naturally takes at least the time of the VHS playback + there could be more time for any other steps you take. If you have lots to convert , then you could be talking a significant investment in time.

[KingSparta]

Alot of info has bounced around this thread but I don't think you ever mentioned exactly what you meant by 'VHS to Computer' ?

Is it your plan to store DVD format files on your hard drive?

Or were you planning on .AVI or god forbid WMV ?

How many you want to convert certainly affects the decision. It naturally takes at least the time of the VHS playback + there could be more time for any other steps you take. If you have lots to convert , then you could be talking a significant investment in time.

I have About 30 Mins Of 8mm Film That Was Taken In 1959 Or So And At Some Point A Few Years Ago It Was Converted From 8mm Film To VHS.

As I Said I Want To:

Convert It From VHS To A Digital File Of Some Sort Without Losing Any Or Too Much Quality.

I Was Not Sure If Going From

1. VHS To DVD To A File Format

Or

2. VHS Direct From The Video Out On The VHS To A Digital Input Device That Is Hooked To A Computer Directly To A File Format Would Be Best.

[MajorTomKY]

If your player can read DVDs then with only that much to keep if the capture equipment keeps it uncompressed you'd have the best quality.  Like I was saying about my sitch I have so much Ihave to use compressed files. Also many movies likely will be viewed quite rarely. They are more library than classics.  What can I say I like bad horror films and some wound up so bad it's rare even I watch them ;-) I would caution against too many reconversion or compressions the quality does degrade.