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-   -   Multiple video capture questions - Hi8, capture system, Huffyuv? (https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-capture/5904-multiple-video-capture.html)

Lightsword 05-16-2014 10:37 PM

Multiple video capture questions - Hi8, capture system, Huffyuv?
 
Hi everyone, I have a few questions I'm hoping I can get some answers and advice.

The first question is a multi part question. How do I best capture DV/Digital8 tapes and Hi8 movies in HuffyYUV lossless codec. At the moment, I've been using my Sony DCR-TRV460 and capturing using my firewire card and WinDV. This is working well but I'm trying to find out how to capture them not just in AVI but also in the right codec. Also, for my Hi8 should I get a better camcorder to play the videos? A camcorder with a TBC, sending the S-Video and audio through a good TBC and Proc Amp, then capturing the result with an AGP All In Wonder card in an Xp system using VirtualDub?

I'm about to fall asleep so I'll edit this tomorrow and add all my other questions so I can have one good place to get everything asked and answered. Thanks so much!

Christopher

sanlyn 05-20-2014 07:45 AM

It seems odd to me that no one has replied here, and a little odd that you somehow missed all the capture guides at digitalfaq as well as in other forums. Here is a brief summary:

Digital-DV originals are neither "recorded" nor "captured". They are transferred (literally copied) via Firewire to a computer. The copy will be exactly like the original. DV-AVI isn't completely lossless but is not as lossy as something like MPEG or h264, the latter two being final delivery formats not designed for extensive editing or post-processing. To get a lossless YV12 version of a DV-AVI transfer, you can decode it in Avisynth (the best choice) or VirtualDub into Lagarith lossless AVI with no quality issues. Consumer level DV-AVI is usually a YV12 or 4:2:0 colorspace; note that many versions of huffyuv compress to YUY2 or RGB, not to YV12, while Lagarith can handle YV12, YUY2, and RGB and gives slightly more compression than huffyuv.

Analog tape is another story. It doesn't translate all that well to DV-AVI. For one thing, analog tape is almost always top field first, but capturing it to DV-AVI is almost always captured via Firewire as bottom field first. With analog->DV capture there are chroma issues with NTSC, and analog noise issues with all analog->DV captures. Capturing analog to lossless YUY2 (via huffyuv or Lagarith) is usually the way it's done for post-process cleanup and editing. If you already have one of the old ATI AGP All In Wonders and a PC that can handle it (it doesn't have to be a new PC), you're home free for a lossless capture with a good VCR. If you don't already have such a card, good luck finding one -- and good luck finding a new PC or motherboard that can mount an AGP capture card.

TBC: there are two basic types of tbc, line-level and full-frame. An analog home-made tape with decent playback has little need for a full-frame tbc but will always require line-timing correction with a line tbc of some kind. If the tapes are copy-protected retail issues, you'll almost always need a full-frame tbc following the line tbc in the capture chain. A tape in bad condition with playback problems will often need both types. I know some people who always use both types of tbc for their analog tape captures. The most important element here is a decent tape player. Cheap and/or inadequate playback gear will get you nowhere.

The idea of lossless analog capture or decoding DV-Avi to lossless media depends on the intended post-processing. DV-AVI is not compatible with most external playback devices; for all practical purposes, DV-AVI means PC-only playback. For DVD or other formats such as DivX, XVid, h264 standard-def BD or AVCHD, etc., DV-AVI and lossless AVI must be re-encoded using the proper codecs and authoring tools. If extensive editing, cleanup, color correction, transitions, audio tracks, timeline work, etc. is part of the process, lossless is preferred and requires re-encoding. Ugly noisy crappy poorly-exposed sources -- whether DV or analog -- require extensive cleanup.

You gain nothing by "capturing" DV to lossless media. Better to make an exact transfer with DV using Firewire. This gives you a true-copy archive that can also be decoded to lossless media if required.

You should know at the outset that archiving DV and analog sources requires time, patience, and a knowledge of the software and processing required. DV sources are usually not as problematic as analog. Most budget editors are fairly easy to learn for working with DV, and products from Vegas or Adobe are adequate for the task unless the source has some godawful problem that requires something like Avisynth or VirtualDub for repair. Analog is more frustrating. The typical budget NLE is underpowered for the kind of repair and restoration often needed for home-made analog sources; most of the time, the results with such software will look worse than the original.

Examine your expectations. Even at its easiest and least problematic, tape-to-disc requires time and a learning curve. Browse through restoration, capture, and authoring forums to get an idea of what's in store.

More information about your capture gear, players, and other hardware would be needed if you want more detail.

lordsmurf 05-20-2014 07:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sanlyn (Post 31905)
It seems odd to me that no one has replied here, and a little odd that you somehow missed all the capture guides at digitalfaq as well as in other forums. Here is a brief summary:

I'm too busy writing guides right now, a little slow to respond to forum posts.

It's one reason that folks like volksjager, NJRoadfan, yourself, etc, are valued members here. You don't just take advice, but are able to give it as well. That's what a forum is all about! Community members helping other community members.

Thanks. :)

volksjager 05-20-2014 08:50 PM

ATI AIW cards are super easy to find and very cheap - there are tons on the them on ebay
i have a couple here i could part with as well.
you can either find a used older PC, or like me simply build a custom one

the DCR-TRV460 is a decent cam and has TBC and DNR - it is accessed through the menu screens
im not sure but it may be one of the very late cams on which Sony eliminated the the S-video port

geomiga 05-21-2014 05:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sanlyn (Post 31905)
It seems odd to me that no one has replied here, and a little odd that you somehow missed all the capture guides at digitalfaq as well as in other forums. Here is a brief summary:

Digital-DV originals are neither "recorded" nor "captured". They are transferred (literally copied) via Firewire to a computer. The copy will be exactly like the original. DV-AVI isn't completely lossless but is not as lossy as something like MPEG or h264, the latter two being final delivery formats not designed for extensive editing or post-processing. To get a lossless YV12 version of a DV-AVI transfer, you can decode it in Avisynth (the best choice) or VirtualDub into Lagarith lossless AVI with no quality issues. Consumer level DV-AVI is usually a YV12 or 4:2:0 colorspace; note that many versions of huffyuv compress to YUY2 or RGB, not to YV12, while Lagarith can handle YV12, YUY2, and RGB and gives slightly more compression than huffyuv.

Analog tape is another story. It doesn't translate all that well to DV-AVI. For one thing, analog tape is almost always top field first, but capturing it to DV-AVI is almost always captured via Firewire as bottom field first. With analog->DV capture there are chroma issues with NTSC, and analog noise issues with all analog->DV captures. Capturing analog to lossless YUY2 (via huffyuv or Lagarith) is usually the way it's done for post-process cleanup and editing. If you already have one of the old ATI AGP All In Wonders and a PC that can handle it (it doesn't have to be a new PC), you're home free for a lossless capture with a good VCR. If you don't already have such a card, good luck finding one -- and good luck finding a new PC or motherboard that can mount an AGP capture card.

Wow! This really opened my eyes, as I've noticed my old home movies just don't have the pizazz and snap on my the DV copies than they do on the original tapes. They were captured using the Sony's TRV-330 FireWire out.

But your comments led me to some questions. My D8 tapes were created in digital format, so they should look OK regarding the top field bottom field argument as they are a digital to digital copy. My analog Hi8 and 8mm tapes will get converted in the camera, then copied over. There could be some problems there. Using the camcorder device as a pass though on VHS and Beta tapes would present that same problem.

Could a solution be as simple as to load the DV files into Premiere or Encoder and do the upper/bottom field processing, or any pull downs necessary, and save the files out?

I am not quite there when it is stated that capturing the video (D8,Hi8,8mm,VHS,Beta, etc) from the players analog outputs into a PC capture card or device, is better than using the A/D converters in the digital camcorder and transferring DV files over FireWire?

sanlyn 05-21-2014 10:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by geomiga (Post 31926)
Could a solution be as simple as to load the DV files into Premiere or Encoder and do the upper/bottom field processing, or any pull downs necessary, and save the files out?

Not recommended. It's not always a problem, but the best way to handle field order problems is to avoid them in the first place. I would not recommend the software you mention for deinterlacing. Other members might differ, but field order isn't the only factor. More details on that below. And most NLE's have inferior deinterlace/reinterlace. But that's another story.

This is getting to be a detailed course in capture, even touching on restoration. It’s available in many threads and articles. Getting to be information overload in a single thread! It’s gleaned from countless other threads and my own and others' experience. I can't be the only user who has gone thru this stuff, and I certainly don't know it all. Meanwhile we don't know what other hardware, player, computer, etc., you have available.

BETA, I believe, is captured via composite only and there are IRE levels involved. But I'm not a BETA user, so experts with that media are what we need there.

DV transferred to a computer via Firewire has the same codec used by your original camera. I don't know what you mean by pull-down, which shouldn't be an issue with interlaced DV source. DV is lossy encoding. To make DVD or even h264 or other formats from it, another lossy encode is required. To compare that to lossless capture, one lossy encode is better than two lossy encodes. The implications of lossy encoding lie in the word "lossy”: each time lossy encoded video is re-encoded, more data is lost from the original. You can think of DV as something like JPG, a lossy gaphics format. Each time you crop, resize, color-correct, denoise, etc., with a JPG image you degrade the image with JPG re-compression. Usually DV doesn't involve recompression loss as severe as MPEG or other more lossy formats, but recompression loss occurs nonetheless. Likely you've seen the term "smart rendering". A smart-rendering editor allows you to make cuts and joins with lossy encoded video by re-encoding only the short section of video frames affected by the cut. Smart-rendering is used for DV, MPEG, and several formats by editors with that feature. However, if you apply denoising, color correction, and other fancy features, smart-rendering is undone: the video has to be decoded to perform the work, and the decoded video must then be re-encoded in its entirety.

I question the use of noise reduction during DV transfer or even afterwards: why would a DV original require a lot of denoising? Perhaps I haven't had enough hands-on with varieties of DV source and haven't done it for many years. Other members would have more experience there. But denoising DV would be a complicated digression here.

Re-recording analog tape via DV camera involves a lossy encode of the analog original using a color/luma matrix and format-to-format "translation" that is similar to (but NOT the same as) the original analog's data storage. Capturing NTSC source as DV input loses 50% of the chroma data, and as mentioned earlier any analog noise and defects from analog source are imbedded in DV as digital artifacts that are difficult to deal with. Certainly, NLE "editors" can't handle it without some very primitive, limited, and destructive filters. Analog video data isn't stored on tape as YV12 but is more usually a flavor of YCbCr; the nearest equivalent to that matrix for most hobbyists is YUY2, not YV12. You wouldn't capture as RGB -- besides giving you an unnecessarily larger capture file, incoming luma and chroma are expanded in RGB translation, usually blowing away highlights and crushing shadow detail. Those details are gone forever. They can't be recovered.

I use a proc amp for VHS capture, but its use is more specific and is the way that most advanced hobbyists use them. At first I used my PA-1 proc amp or VirtualDub capture's "levels" filters (they hook into your graphic card's "proc amp" controls and are not RGB filters) to correct some of the horrible color you get with VHS and many players. I ended up shaking my fist at every capture, finally discarding them. It's impossible to correct VHS color problems during capture. VHS Color balance and luma will change every few seconds. Those changes are compounded with home-made video and camera "auto" controls, autogain being a nightmare. Proc amp controls are used to set luma values to fall within the standard broadcast range of RGB 16-235. In VirtualDub you use VDub's capture histogram to check those levels. On the PA-1 proc amp you can use its handy luminance meter, which alone is worth twice the steep price of the unit. For that purpose, a pricey proc amp isn't essential because VDub's level filters accomplish the same thing and don't require additional hookup cables. True, you sometimes get a tape from hell that needs capture-time color work. But those corrections tend to be rather basic. You get more precision in post-processing with far more sophisticated color filters. You can use heavy-duty proc amps for color fixup, and many people often do -- but as noted by lordsmurf: unless you know what you're doing and have developed a good eye for problems, the results can be permanently ugly.

If you think you are "filtering" and denosing during VHS capture, I wager that you don't yet spot the usual analog defects. Here is a brief rundown of defects that capture-time filtering and typical NLE's won't fix: dropouts, comets, flicker, jitter/judder/frame-hopping, rips, ripples, color flicker along borders, rainbows and other chroma noise, chroma bleed, edge ghosts, DCT ringing, chroma shift, border stains, head-switching noise, bad "flash" frames with nothing but static......and there are more. If some of that VHS was recorded off a TV movie-based broadcast, expect telecine effects (hard-coded pulldown) and even the horrors of blend-deinterlacing and duplicate frames.

If you have a more advanced hardware setup as used by lordsmurf and other pros, then obviously you can do better during capture. Be prepared to spend a lot of loot (a second mortgage loan might help you get started) and learn to use these and the associated electronics required.

You mentioned denoising and sharpening. As far as I can tell, these filters in consumer gear and most NLE's are cures that are worse than the disease. Don't sharpen during capture. Especially with analog, you're mostly sharpening noise. DV itself often looks somewhat oversharpened to begin with, IMO. Avisynth and VirtualDub have advanced sharpeners, many with settings that prevent the usual bleed and edge halo effects. Increasing saturation almost always results in noisy, "hot", sometimes flickering colors and chroma bleed. Post processing is better. The denoisers I've seen in capture software are too primitive. Ghosting, blurring, destruction of fine detail, and motion smearing are common. These effects are worse than the original problem and can't be undone. In many forums I've seen "denoised" captures that were so denuded they look like computer animation.

If the only tbc you have available is in your DV camera, and if VHS->DV is all you can get, at least you have a tbc to help. Expect to do some cleanup on those captures. ATI's "600" series of USB devices can often be found for lossless capture. Don't use cheap or off-brand USB devices -- you'll regret it, even if some of them advertise their "tbc" feature.

The tbc's in upscale JVC and Panasonic players do work, but they aren't without side effects -- and you'll have to find a unit that still works properly, which can be a lottery on the used market. I do have a rebuilt Panasonic AG-1980, certainly not cheap, but that famous unit has some infamous problems of its own. JVC's prime units (some of which I've used in the past) are unsatisfactory for 6-hour tapes, will often reject damaged VHS, and the over-aggressive DNR is annoying to many (but not all) users. Much depends on individual tapes. Having only one tbc-equipped player handcuffs you to that single player and its tbc and dnr, which often won't handle some tapes very well. Many but not all of my VHS captures use rebuilt/serviced upscale Panasonics (in good condition, they ain't exactly cheap either) from 1996 and 1998, some of which are SVHS players with s-video output. One of the best VCR's I ever owned was a 1994 upscale JVC (no tbc, but superb playback, and I kick myself for selling it when I remarried! I really miss that one). Even then, one tape plays better on one player than on another, and often the AG-1980 is my only recourse despite some drawbacks. Except for a few pro and semi-pro brands, anything made after 1999 is useless. JVC and Panasonic players from the mid to late 1990's tend to have more stable playback and far better mechanics than found in later models.

If I don't use the tbc-furnished player, I used a DVD recorder as a tbc pass-thru device. You feed the VCR to the unit, then connect the unit's output directly to the capture setup without recording to the DVD recorder. The tape simply "plays thru" the device. Not all DVD-R's can be used this way. The favorites nowadays are the Panasonic DMR-ES10 and DMR-ES15, or to a somewhat lesser but still effective extent the Toshiba "RD-XS" series. Any modern DVD-Rs you can find (good luck) aren't nearly as competent and likely can't be used for pass-thru. Absolutely no one claims that these pass-thru's can beat a studio tbc or some aspects of tbc-equipped VCR's. But they're better than nothing, better than cheapo capture cards, and can give surprising results. The Toshiba units have a decent y/c filter for composite input/s-video conversion, but I feel the Panasonics have a better y/c filter (but remember to turn off Panny's playback DNR which is too strong). In all but a few cases, the pass-thru's also defeat copy protection -- there's always that one tape whose Macrovision won't behave.

Whew! That gives you plenty to think about. I have to get back to my own HD->DVD conversion. Been driving me bonkers for a week now.

Anyone else?

Lightsword 05-21-2014 11:15 AM

​Thank you all for your fantastic replies. I've been rereading it a couple of times to fully digest the info you've provided and assimilate it with the guides I've already read. I do not yet have most of the capture gear for my analog videos, but I'm in the process of setting up a custom AGP Windows XP ATI All In Wonder capture system for the videos. At the moment my skills aren't very good yet but I'm learning.
Essentially my goals for the capture and restoration are pretty straight forward, I'd like to capture as much detail and quality as possible from my source files and save them losslessly. I'll go through and edit and convert the videos to a suitable output format but keep my source files so I can go back and re-edit then as I continue to improve my skills and tools. I'd like to take a bunch of family movies, digitize them in lossless/best quality then edit them, preserve them for the future and finally burn them to DVD with menus to share with the rest of my immediate and extended family.

I'll primarily be capturing DV Hi8 and 8mm tapes to start with and as I get better I'd like to capture good VHS tapes as well. My grandfather used to videotape lots of family memories on VHS and now that he's passed away, I'd like to preserve those memories for my family. All videos are NTSC as far as I'm aware.

The hardware I have on hand already

Home Built PC:
i7 4770K CPU
Asus Maximus VI Hero Motherboard
6GB DDR3 Ram
Sapphire R9 280X VaporX GPU
Intel Software RAID0 Main HDD, Two WD Black HDDs
Syba Texas Insturments Chipset Firewire Card
Sony DCR-TRV460 DV camcorder
Windows 8.1 for OS.

While I realize Windows 8 is universally panned for video work :smack: It's what I have at the moment for my primary editing system. I do have a copy of Windows XP Pro for my new capture system and Windows 7 Ultimate that I plan to dual boot sometime in the near future for my primary desktop. I figured I can configure it to dual boot 8.1 for my primary OS and reboot to 7 for editing and converting. I also have Adobe Premiere Elements for my primary NLE and I have almost all of the freeware listed here installed already as well :D

I've read most of the guides over the past month and your post really helped Sanlyn. It allowed me to assimilate a lot of info I previously had and synthesize it into a workable state.

So to kinda break down what I've gathered, my best plan for any digital video format I have is DV camcorder>firewire>WinDV. This gets me the raw file(s) that I can then pass through AviSynth to convert the AVI codec to lagarith in order to losslessly edit and fix the video files. After I get the files in the state I'm really happy with, follow the wonderful guides to add menus and titles and author then burn my new DVD/Blu-Ray videos!

Analog Video: This is going to be the real bear :D
For Hi8/8MM tapes, I'd use the camcorder's S-Video output and audio out to pass the video to my capture system I'm building and encode the file in HuffYuv or Lagarith using Virtualdub. In between the capture card and the camera it sounds like it would be a good idea to have a full frame TBC such as the AVToolbox AVT-8710 or DataVideo TBC-1000. From reading Volksjager's comments it appears that my camcorder has a TBC (I'm going to assume it's a line level TBC) so it would be nice to have a full frame TBC to just handle any other issues that could crop up in the video. After it's been captured it seems like it'll be a similar process to edit it and post process it after it's captured. Finally, for VHS I'll need to get at least one good JVC S-VHS VCR and use that in the same manner to capture it's output.

For my capture system, I'm hunting for parts and would appreciate any advice anyone has. I've already purchased a copy of XP Pro and am going to be sure to just install SP2. I've built and rebuilt several computers so I'm comfortable with the process. I'm thinking of using one of these motherboards as the core of my system:
http://www.amazon.com/ASRock-K8Upgra...54+motherboard

http://www.ebay.com/itm/GENUINE-Asus...item3cd348d851

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Acer-AGP-DDR...item3cddde8b3e

http://www.ebay.com/itm/MSI-Microsta...item566229df63

Anyone have any thoughts? I'm trying to save money on the parts but still invest in good quality hardware. I'd rather spend the money up front on good stuff than buy cheap trash and have to replace it with good parts when they don't work. After I pick the motherboard, I'll find a good CPU and start putting together my system. I'm currently building a custom desk with small server racks built as the legs on each side so I'm going to build and rackmount my capture system. After I start to gather my parts I'll hunt down a good AIW capture card as well :D

Thank you all so much for your support and advice. Feel free to ask any questions that you think will help you better understand or give me guidance. I'm looking forward to the days that I get to give back to this wonderful community! If anyone has any questions about linux or home servers I'd be glad to take a stab at answering it. I'm by no means an expert but I've built a couple already and had great sucess with them. I'm going to soon rebuild my current server and greatly expand my storage capacity to allow me to store my rapidly balloning digital media collection! :)

volksjager 05-21-2014 12:17 PM

for a motherboard avoid VIA chipsets - use only Intel chipsets

here is my pc:
Intel D875PBZ motherboard - (best socket 478 chipset and has Sata ports)
4gb Gskill PC-3200 ram
intel 3.4ghz northwood CPU socket 478
sony optiarc dvd burner
ATI AIW 9200 capture card
Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS sound card
80gb WD Velociraptor - this is OS drive
2TB Seagate Barracuda - this is storage drive
630 watt raidmax fully modular power supply
Zalman GT-1000 case

sanlyn 05-21-2014 02:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lightsword (Post 31930)
Thank you all for your fantastic replies. I've been rereading it a couple of times to fully digest the info you've provided and assimilate it with the guides I've already read. I do not yet have most of the capture gear for my analog videos, but I'm in the process of setting up a custom AGP Windows XP ATI All In Wonder capture system for the videos. At the moment my skills aren't very good yet but I'm learning.

Previous post has a worthy note about AMD chips. I have one AMD oldie that works OK, but newer Intels do a dance around the current AMD's for video.

Hope you aren't overwhelmed. I sure was, at first. Welcome to the learning club. We're all learners here.

You can use Firewire with Win7 as far as I know. Stick with XP for analog. My first ATI-AIW came with my Windows 3.1 PC (oK, folks, stop counting years). It took 2 days to make my first 15-minute DVD extravaganza. I was very proud of myself. I eagerly loaded the disc into my player. The player thought about it for about 5 tense seconds, then spit the disc back out at me. That night I found this forum.

I still use 7500 and 9600XT AIW Radeon's on home-built XP SP3's with VirtualDub capture. Unless someone has figured out how to use a DV camera with that setup, VDub won't recognize your camera for capture. For analog tbc I use the methods described earlier. With today's XP I still use 2004 ATI drivers (Catalyst 4.7). Never a hitch. You won't need ATI's MCM Theater or media player -- OK in their day, but their day has passed. All you'll need are the WDM capture drivers, the basic video driver, and the Control Panel. In fact installing Media Theater overrides some codecs in your registry, so don't install it.

My analog gets captured at 640x480 standard def, YUY2 with huffyuv, but you can use 720x480. That comes to about 30GB for a 90-minute movie. For posting and sharing AVI's and work files, Lagarith is better due to occasional huffyuv compatibility issues on different machines. You can also capture with Lagarith if you wish, but I had a few dropped frames with the very slightly slower Lagarith compressor on my ancient and cheapo 2 GHz machine. If you decode DV captures to lossless AVI for delicate work, remember that DV is YV12. Now and then you might have to go to RGB for some filters -- Avisynth can handle such conversions better than anything else, as you will discover.

I suppose the very mention of AVisynth strikes fear into the hearts of many. If I could learn to use the darn thing, anyone can. I had lordsmurf and a few others drag me kicking and screaming into it. But like many users, you'll find problems that only Avisynth can fix. I managed to get the hang of it in a day. Avisynth can work some serious magic.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lightsword (Post 31930)
While I realize Windows 8 is universally panned for video work It's what I have at the moment for my primary editing system. I do have a copy of Windows XP Pro for my new capture system and Windows 7 Ultimate that I plan to dual boot sometime in the near future for my primary desktop. I figured I can configure it to dual boot 8.1 for my primary OS and reboot to 7 for editing and converting. I also have Adobe Premiere Elements for my primary NLE and I have almost all of the freeware listed here installed already as well

There are many reasons why Win8 is universally panned for video work. I have Win8 and Win7 machines, but not for video repair or restoration. For one thing, many favorite Avisynth and VDub filters won't work in Win7 or 8. The only video work I do with Win7 is to transfer HD work to it for final HD assembly and encoding/authoring with TMPGenc software, sometimes with the HCenc encoder. For win7 and 8, use 32-bit filters with 32-bit apps. Neither VirtualDub nor Avisynth offer much at all in 64-bit plugins. The only "NLE" I use is 32-bit After Effects Pro, and then only for some really tricky work in XP. Very difficult to match AE's color filters, although VDub has some good ones. But I don't do much timeline work. TMPGenc Mastering Works also has a decent timeline if I need it. Note that NLE's such as Premiere use RGB for most of their filters; use Avisynth to make that conversion. Premiere Elements is OK for timelines (using lossless media) and casual users, but you can get better DVD encoders. Not that it's a terrible encoder, but there are better ones. NOTE: that's just my personal choice after going through a bunch of encoders! Your mileage might differ.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lightsword (Post 31930)
my best plan for any digital video format I have is DV camcorder>firewire>WinDV. This gets me the raw file(s) that I can then pass through AviSynth to convert the AVI codec to lagarith in order to losslessly edit and fix the video files. After I get the files in the state I'm really happy with, follow the wonderful guides to add menus and titles and author then burn my new DVD/Blu-Ray videos!

A worthy goal we all share. One caution: many wives have limited understanding of the need for all this rigamarole and angst. Mine is such a wife. But she endures, bless her.

Another advantage to lossless originals is that you can go to other formats without altering your archive. I've encoded several standard def captures to AVCHD and BluRay SD disc, and a couple were converted to progressive video for YouTube and FaceBook using Avisynth's QTGMC, the premiere deinterlace plugin for us amateurs...and some pros as well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lightsword (Post 31930)
Analog Video: This is going to be the real bear
For Hi8/8MM tapes, I'd use the camcorder's S-Video output and audio out to pass the video to my capture system I'm building and encode the file in HuffYuv or Lagarith using Virtualdub. In between the capture card and the camera it sounds like it would be a good idea to have a full frame TBC such as the AVToolbox AVT-8710 or DataVideo TBC-1000. From reading Volksjager's comments it appears that my camcorder has a TBC (I'm going to assume it's a line level TBC) so it would be nice to have a full frame TBC to just handle any other issues that could crop up in the video. After it's been captured it seems like it'll be a similar process to edit it and post process it after it's captured. Finally, for VHS I'll need to get at least one good JVC S-VHS VCR and use that in the same manner to capture it's output.

Once you get to the lossless stage, the processes are similar. But as noted, VirtualDub and camcorders rarely mix. That's going to be a hurdle, but I solved that one as described earlier. You're not likely to need a full-frame tbc for home-made video, but they're handy for nightmare tapes. They degrade the image somewhat, so don't use it unless needed.

The motherboards look okay. I'm a fan of old ASUS boards.

You might need to install XP's SP3. My antivirus wouldn't support SP2, nor would After Effects, some new TMPGenc software, and my monitor's updated calibration gear. I had no probs with SP3.

Best wishes. You'll find that your most essential tool is patience. :)

NJRoadfan 05-21-2014 06:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sanlyn (Post 31937)
Previous post has a worthy note about AMD chips. I have one AMD oldie that works OK, but newer Intels do a dance around the current AMD's for video.

Hope you aren't overwhelmed. I sure was, at first. Welcome to the learning club. We're all learners here.

You can use Firewire with Win7 as far as I know. Stick with XP for analog. My first ATI-AIW came with my Windows 3.1 PC (oK, folks, stop counting years).

That was 1997. I still have my original ATI AIW.

OP, Digital 8 camcorders are fine for Hi-8 playback, you won't do any better. For a "no fuss" capture, doing it via Firewire with WinDV is fine.

Lightsword 05-22-2014 09:26 AM

What's everyone's consensus on Nvidia Chipsets? The Asrock motherboard has a Nvidia Chipset and from what I remember, it was suposed to be really solid as well. Would either of these boards be good foundations since they have Intel Chipsets?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ABIT-IC7-mot...item3a9082c32d

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-D865PE...item4d1d10a9b3

Thanks guys!

volksjager 05-22-2014 09:48 AM

the 865 intel is a good chipset too - those are good boards
nvidea is mostly for onboard grahpics - i prefer boards without onboard graphics or sound
VIA , SIS & INTEL are the common chipsets forthese era boards
the d875pbz does not have onboard video and most dont have onboard sound either
the 875 is just a little better than the 865
i may have a extra board here and i know i have some 478 cpus -
for ram get 4 1gb sticks of matched ram - i like the Gskill pc3200 with heat speaders -if you look around you can get it under $10 a stick

Lightsword 05-22-2014 10:24 AM

If you have a spare board and CPU that would be fantastic! :D

volksjager 05-22-2014 10:50 AM

just looked and i have an extra D875PBZ with a 2.8ghz cpu and heatsink/fan
i dont have any ram though
did you still want the AIW cards too?

Lightsword 05-22-2014 11:53 AM

Yes please! Did you get the PM with my email?


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