Hi, I'm working on a project where I'm capturing all of my VHS concerts, home movies, etc..I've got some free time and it's kind of a labor of love. I do NOT plan on burning these files to DVD, I just want to be able to play them from hard drives (my MAC hooks up to my HDTV also)
Quality is important and I am happy with my set up (JVC deck > Canopus Converter > MAC), and I am capturing in Final Cut X so no problems there. Final Cut captures the material with the DV codec and uncompressed audio and I can also export to this format as well which I think looks great (I mean we're talking about VHS here, so not literally "great").
My issue lies with the file sizes, it's about 15GB for an hour long file, which is not ideal since I have a lot of tapes to transfer and I don't want to have to use THAT many hard drives. I've done some tests using FCPX and MPEG streamclip exporting to H264 MOV/MP4 and I'm not totally satisfied. Whenever I convert to H264 with either I can see what looks like scan lines/interlacing that is NOT on the original DV file. Unchecking "interlaced scaling" in streamclip did not help, FCPX doesn't really have options like that.
What is everyone else using for this? MPEG2? Even with the interlacing it doesn't look that bad, but I just want to get off on the right foot once I get this project going. Or I can just be happy with the huge files and get a bunch of 4TB HDs, that should probably cover the whole thing...
any advice would be appreciated
-- merged --
OK - I realize this got zero replies because a zillion versions of this same question have been asked and answered in this forum and I read a lot on the subject the last few days, so I'd like to narrow my questions down to just a few, mostly in the export process:
1. my DV capture w/the Canopus box of a VHS tape does NOT look interlaced to my eyes, but when I export to H264 I need to deinterlace the file or else I see interlacing lines not present on the original DV file capture, why is this?
2. accepting that I need to deinterlace regardless of the above answer (since my opinion is that the footage looks better that way), the only other setting in MPEG Streamclip I'm worried about is "Field Dominance" - Upper or Lower - It seems like "Lower" is the correct choice since that is what DV is, but I did a few tests and I cannot see any difference between upper and lower, so does this matter?
3. I am using mpeg streamclip to export to H264 since it gives me way more options (bitrate, etc.) than fcpx. However, I played around with handbrake but a few things seemed wonky to me, esp regarding frame size. Is there any reason MPEG Streamclip is NOT OK for what I'm using it for?
Thanks