Hi All--Glad to find an active resource/community here. I've done a bit of reading, and found a original-owner selling a lightly used JVC HR-S9500U on craigslist for $200. (let me know if this is a bad deal, I like the idea of buying locally vs rolling the dice on amazon/ebay but if I should hold out for a better deck I'm open to that)
My dad just shipped me a couple large boxes of VHS home movies from my youth in the 80's/90's and it is my intent to archive these before they are lost to time. I don't have an unlimited budget, but I'm willing to spend money where it makes sense and hopefully recover some costs by reselling equipment after the project is complete. Questions: What is by best value for digital a conversion/capture device? I'm open to USB, (or FireWire if it is a must) or an ad-in type PCI card. I want to avoid driver issues with Windows 8.1 if at all possible. What is the preferred archival encoding/file format and software? I have Adobe Creative Cloud subscription and am familiar with Premier Pro if that helps. ~10 Terabytes of free storage to play with, so that shouldn't be a limiting factor although I'd probably like to compress the final files to save space/upload to cloud storage. Anything else I'm missing or should be considering? Thanks in advance for any advice! -- merged -- So, I picked up an old AJA KONA LHe PCIe card off an Amazon seller for $100. I called their tech support to inquire about Windows 8.1 compatibility and while they were not exactly hopeful I concluded it was worth a shot. I can always spin up Win 7 in a VM or on a spare box if it comes down to it. I picked this option since it should give me an uncompressed capture that I can encode as I choose. Hopefully the VCR I'm looking at will do the trick. I also just talked to my Dad and he found a trove of Mini-DV tapes hes going to send me too (hopefully along with the camera) That should be an easier problem to solve as firewire is still a thing. |
The 9500 is listed here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...ing-guide.html
Unless you test the unit on-spot, before buying, and you know what flaws you're looking for, it may still be a gamble. I often find Craiglist to be no better (maybe even worse) than a good eBay seller or seller in our own marketplace forum. If working, then $200 is a good price. I just finished paying $275 for a 9800 from one of our members. How many tapes do you have? Ideally, set up a dedicated offline capture PC, probably based on Windows XP. Capture with it. The ATI AIW cards are most suggested. Your Aja card is probably best for Windows Vista, as that was the OS at the time when it came out. You cannot access hardware for capturing in a VM OS. You also need an external TBC. See http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...time-base.html Premiere is not a good capture tool, as it often causes dropped frames. But it is quite good for editing, and can be used for exporting to MPEG (as its based on the MainConcept/Rovi SDK). My preferred NLE is Premiere CS4, and I've been using Premiere since the late 90s. If you plan to export for web streaming (Youtube, etc) the best way to deinterlace is via Avisynth, using QTGMC. Premiere is terrible at deinterlacing. I find that Blu-ray/broadcast spec interlaced MPEG-2 @ 15mbps is a good archival format. Use Huffyuv lossless for your "working format" when editing and/or restoring, but the final output can be MPEG. You can store a copy of disc, distribute it to others, and store it on HDD to play directly with something like a WDTV. It's a very multi-purpose quality format. |
Thank you for the reply!
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I realize I should be reading through more of the ATI AIW threads/stickies to find an answer to this question, but are the AIW cards more likely to work on a modern PC/OS than the Aja, do they offer any advantages over the Aja in terms of image/capture quality, or software compatibility? Quote:
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Thanks again for the advice. |
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