Please help. The remaining hair I have is graying at an accelerated rate... that is what I don't pull out. I have 20 years computer experience in many fields EXCEPT video. I am realizing there is much, much more to what I want to do which is: I want to record with an analog camcorder maybe 2 hours worth of scenes. Transfer those to computer and crop to 1 hour of solid info. Then transfer back to VHS for sale with future options of on CD and on DVD. I want the normal "watch it on TV size and quality". I first bought a firewire/ulead combo only to find out I don't have DV camcorder. Then I bough a PCTV PRO because it said it would capture video from a camcorder and I have Studio 7 software coming in. After reading all this stuff and now finding this forum I am realizing I don't know squat about this. Can anybody offer me a solid, simple solution before I nickel and dime myself to death. Thanks in advance
Kinda depends on how much $$$ you want to spend, but I have a system based around the Canopus DVStorm card. It allows you to do DV/Analog capture, and also has the option for a hardware MPEG2 encoding daughter board. Most edits with effects can be played back to tape (DV or VHS) in real-time without having to re-encode. Very happy with it. (http://www.canopuscorp.com) Oh, and buy a BIG HDD.
I use kinda old hardware, but "if it works, don't fix it" to do my analog capturing -- Matrox Marvel G200. I basically capture all my analog input using Huffyuv or built-in M-JPEG encoding (Huffyuv is "non-lossy" and M-JPEG "slightly lossy" format -- this means they take helluva lot of HDD, but the picture quality is "as good as it gets") with full resolution (704x576/25fps in PAL). Then I normally cut/merge the clips I need on raw format and once I get nice stream, I'm ready to encode. You probably want to do the VHS transfer at this point, before encoding the video into lossy format. Encoding with either TMPGEnc or CCE into MPEG-2 using ABR of 5000kbps gives you nice DVD-quality results. Obviously this all depends on your source material. I use Hi8 analog camcorder, import video to capture card using S-Video cables, etc.. Trying to minimize the loss of quality.
