Newb, overwhelmed, tired.
Good evening!
Over the last few days I've been absorbing as much analog video to digital information as I can, and desperately trying to teach myself the tools at the very least just enough to get my project done and hopefully return to a state of ignorant bliss afterwards. I'll try to be as descriptive as possible:
My project is to transfer a series of old 8mm tapes (spanning from 1991 to the early 2000) to DVDs playable in both NA and Europe and are, hopefully, as good looking as possible. In short I’m transferring precious old home videos to share with family who don’t have many memento’s of those eras.
I’m running a Windows 7 84bit PC with an Intel E3-Xeon processor and an AMD 7870LE video card.
I have a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 1850 capture card (running via PCI-Express)
I’m playing the tapes off a borrowed Hitachi Camcorder (VM-E545LA) connected to the above card via RCA cables (video jack and mono audio connected to the card via a cheap rca stereo to 3.5mm plug RadioShack adapter)
All tapes were recorded with a Sony (CCD-TR4) cam which I still have but is troublesome due to it’s single old propriety a/v cable, and heads which have probably never been cleaned in 23 years.
My general usual use media player is VLC, but this may not be the case for most people that may try viewing the disks on PC, but remedied easily enough by telling them to download it.
So far,
I’ve found and installed:
VirtualDub 64 (v 1.9.11)
HuffyUV 64 (v2.11)
Xvid (1.3.2)
I can successfully capture the full 2 hour tape In Virtual Dub with
huffyuv compression into an .avi file at just about 80gigs. Audio is good and synched.
From that file, in Virtual Dub again, I select to add the provided basic “deinterlace” filter (using Yadif algorithm) and re-encode the file using the Xvid MPEG-4 Codec at default settings.
This results in a manageable 4.1 gig avi file. Once that file is burned to a regular dvd disc, it’s playable either pc using VLC and the dvd player I have on hand, a PS3. I guess I may have issues with “dumber” dvd-players in the future, but no fancy dvd menus are really necessary anyway. Given time constraints on this project, this much would do the job for now and the only person irked would be I.
Irked because I notice these issues:
The deinterlacing is far from perfect and i can spots mistakes and artifacts left and right. I may not be too experienced with this, but the interpolated images, in some cases, looked “nicer”.
The is some odd coloration issues (on peoples clothing for example) that may possibly due to graininess on the original or low light conditions.
The image is often rather shaky, as my dad was getting used to the whole filming thing.
Googling, I'm recommended towards
plug-ins for Virtual Dub, and the use of
AviSinth.
AviSinth scripting confuses me right off the bat, as after installing it had no executable.
The two filters I attempted to run from Gunnar’s site (Deinterlace Smooth, and Deshaker) would not load in Virtual Dub (
VirtualDub Error: Cannot load plugin module “C:\...filepath\DeinterlaceSmooth.vdf”: %1 is not a valid Win32 application.)
Frustratingly, the only installation instructions I find just mention to drop in the plugins folder of virtualdub, but I don’t have one. Manually creating a plugins folder in its directory doesn’t work either.
I don’t even know how to apply the smart deinterlace and deshaker filters should i even get them to work.
Is it at the same time? Or start by deinterlacing first and processing to (which codec format?) and then apply deshaker as I process to the xvid? Should I even bother?
Restating, as I lack in the proper understanding of procedures of filters and encoding, can I tell VDub to apply multiple filters and go straight from the huffy encoding to divx, or do I have to apply each one in turn and encode every time? If so, which encoding do I use for the intermediary steps, and how much more time could it take?
So far the basic process I have above takes about 5 hours from start to finish per tape, and it's more than a little disheartening when I look at that pile of tapes.
If anyone can guide me on this a little bit it would be greatly appreciated!
