Hi all- I've been assigned the task by my old man to digitally capture about 15 8mm tapes that were made back in the 80's. A friend has let me borrow a Sony Hi8 Player/Recorder and an iLink Digital AV Interface to do the converting. The plan is to convert all the tapes as DV video to minimize the compression and get the files in their most original state. I went out and bought a couple of 250GB FW hard drives to store all of the video. My friend had suggested that I seperate the video into "scenes" so the files wouldn't be too big. The problem with this is that it's taking FOREVER to do this. 15 tapes at 2 hours a piece can take a long time since I have to sit there, watch the video, and start/stop the conversion. I've tried using capturing programs that have the automatic scene detection but it doesn't seem to work. I've heard these only really work when capturing from a newer DV camera. So my question is: what choices do I have? Is there really a problem with having 20-30GB video files? Having this would allow me to start the capture and come back 2 hours later to stop it. Or, is there a capturing program where I can have the video files be split up in specified chunk sizes? I'm really not a A/V person (as you may tell) so any help would greatly appreciated. Thanks!
I can not see any advantage at all to Haveing small files, I actually see it as more of a Hinderance.... All you would need is a Good Video editing program and it can do automatic scene detection for you... If you just want to transfer these Files to DVD without any Editing then it is simpler to just capture the Video as one Big file and then Encode it to Mpeg2 and Authoring it to DVD... Most Good Capture Programs have a setting for File spliting so you can set it to a Certain Size and as soon as the Files get to that size it starts a New File.... Programs Like "Ulead Media studio 7 pro" have scene detection and so does Pinnacle Studio 8/9 but I don"t like the Program, and Capture programs Like WinDVR 3.0 and even Virtual-Dub have settings for File spliting when captureing.... Cheers
