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.
