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  #1  
01-09-2017, 12:32 PM
der_blockhead61 der_blockhead61 is offline
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Hey folks I am new to capturing/digitizing VHS to digital, I am trying to determine how much storage space I'll need for my capturing project:

I am capturing some important old VHS tapes, I've read that it's best to use huffyuv uncompressed so that's what I'll do.

I've seen from practice that with
huffyuv 2 minutes of video = 1 gb filesize

I have 25 videotapes to digitize with 2 hours of video each

50 hours total = 3000 minutes

3000/2 =1500 so about 1.5 terabytes are needed to capture 50 hours of video using huffyuv, am I right?


I am going to use virtualdub for this but if anyone has recommendations for other capturing software I'm glad to hear them.

Also regarding virtualdub, any recommendations are welcome

Thank You
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01-09-2017, 01:31 PM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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Welcome to digitalfaq. And if you're up for some restoration work and quality output for your ultimate goal, you're on the right track.

Computers are for work, not for storage. No one -- at least no one with prior experience -- would store their captures on their PC. External USB drives of 500GB to 1TB are so cheap these days and so well made (try Western Digital Elements or Toshiba Canvio Basic), they're a mainstay for storage and for saving your work files. The PC is for current working activity.

The storage isn't by tape but by program hours. It's not likely that you'll digitize every stitch of video on those tapes. At least some of it will be bypassed as not worth the effort, or quickly archived as high bitrate lossy codecs like MPEG2 or h.264 without further work. So that will save some space and time. The average rate for huffyuv YUY2 captures is about 25GB per hour. 3000 minutes would be 50 hours. That's a little shorter than what I started with a while back (380 hours!). I'd suggest that you won't capture all of it in one stretch (trust us on that) but will capture a few hours and get to work putting those into final form before you resume the rest. A total of 50 hours at ~25 GB per hour would be about 1.25 to 1.5 GB. That's just about what I have archived at this point on some 500GB drives. (although I didn't keep all of the captures). A lot of tape has passed under the bridge since I started.

After capture onto my PC I quickly review the video in VirtualDub and copy it to one of the external drives. Over time, I pull off sections and segments, clean it up or do whatever I must, edit everything into a final working project, and encode it to DVD or to standard definition BluRay. That leaves plenty of room on the working PC for further work. I don't discard the tape until each project is completed (you can trust that advice as well). Fore working files for each project you'll need a 250GB working drive, minimum. After the project is finished, clear off what you don't want to keep -- I keep Avisynth scripts and VirtualDub filter settings and Notepad note files, but not the intermediate AVI working files. Then clear the working drive for the next project.

Capture short segments at first to get a feel for this crazy activity. After the initial practice, the rest is pretty boring as far as capture goes. Restoration and repair is where the fun starts. An updated and detailed VirtualDub capture settings guide is here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...-settings.html. Looks complicated at first, but you only have to set it up once. Much of it is default settings, depending on your capture device.

If you have questions, give us all the tech info you can (player, capture card, operating system, etc,). Let us know how things are going, and good luck.
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01-12-2017, 01:26 PM
der_blockhead61 der_blockhead61 is offline
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Thank you for the reply -

So I aim to capture raw uncompress without filters etc. so that if, in future someone wants to edit the video, they would have an unaltered baseline video to work with:

I plan to capture at 720x 480, huffyuv, uncompressed pcm audio using virtualdub. Source is standard vhs

Anything else I should know? Thank you
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01-12-2017, 03:22 PM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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Set your capture colorspace to YUY2, not RGB.
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01-12-2017, 11:53 PM
der_blockhead61 der_blockhead61 is offline
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One other thing - the vhs tapes have more than 1 recording event on them e.g. "piano recital" & "birthday party". I will need to split the video into separate files based on these different events. I plan to just capture the entire videotape in one go, and then split it afterwards - is this the best way to do it, and if so, would I use virtualdub to split the video into multiple files, or is there another program I should use?

Thank you so much
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01-13-2017, 03:23 AM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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You can use Virtualdub to cut and join lossless AVI. To save your edits in the same lossless colorspace and huffyuv format you start with, set processing to "Direct stream copy" in the "Video" pulldown menu. You can also use other editing programs that accept lossless huffyuv and which can be directed to output the same lossless format. But VirtualDub is probably the the most handy tool.
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01-13-2017, 08:34 AM
der_blockhead61 der_blockhead61 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sanlyn View Post
You can use Virtualdub to cut and join lossless AVI. To save your edits in the same lossless colorspace and huffyuv format you start with, set processing to "Direct stream copy" in the "Video" pulldown menu. You can also use other editing programs that accept lossless huffyuv and which can be directed to output the same lossless format. But VirtualDub is probably the the most handy tool.
thanks sanlyn -

this would be in the virtual dub main menu right? where you mark in/mark out the video file etc ?
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01-13-2017, 09:16 PM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by der_blockhead61 View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by sanlyn View Post
You can use Virtualdub to cut and join lossless AVI. To save your edits in the same lossless colorspace and huffyuv format you start with, set processing to "Direct stream copy" in the "Video" pulldown menu. You can also use other editing programs that accept lossless huffyuv and which can be directed to output the same lossless format. But VirtualDub is probably the the most handy tool.
this would be in the virtual dub main menu right? where you mark in/mark out the video file etc ?
On VirtujalDub's top main menu bar, the Start/End and otehr edit controls are in the top "Edit" menu. The top "Video" menu has processing modes, color depth, and compression.

Also, if you click the top "Help" menu and then "Contents" (F1) you'll see enough reading material for a full weekend.
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