Wanted to share this with any users who have just bought a PC and dont want to modify it for capturing VHS etc, voiding their warrenty! I have been trying for some time to find a way to put my old VHS and HI8 tapes onto my hard drive for editing down and burning to DVD, but without buying a capture card for my PC (this would void my warrenty). I have also looked at stand alone analogue to digital converter and paid £200 for a "Hollywood DVD Bridge" on ebay only to find I still needed a firewire or 1394 card installed!. Anyway, I found that all I actually needed was to get my tapes converted to regular DVD's (unedited via a conversion company) and to then convert the DVD's to AVI on my hard drive using "DVD to AVI" software. This has worked out great and the resulting digital video is the full 720 X 576 for good quality DVD authoring. One important point is to make sure whatever company converts your analogue tapes to digital does it at a high bit rate of at least 4000KBPS (kilo bits per second) or you might get arifacts when you re-edit. I used [bold] http://www.transfervideo.com [bold]as they worked out the cheapest, but make sure you ask for the high bit rate DVD's. If anyone needs help finding the conversion software email me and I can give you a hand!
Hi Brentsher - I am using Pinnacle Studio 9 to edit my Digital tapes via my computer and making DVDs of all my movies. That is going great. However I have older footage from a few years ago that are on Hi8mm tapes. I was looking into converting them to DVD via a company... and then I realized that I need them converted to AVI files so I can continue to edit them with Pinnacle. What is the cheapest way to get this footage to something I can work with?
wow, they said that installing a capture card voids the warranty? That's stupid. You could always buy an external capture device (a bit more money) that plugs into your USB or Firewire port and capture that way. The capture device should come with software for capturing/editing/converting to DVD, but there's also more software available that gives you more options (like menus) and better quality in the conversion.
Hi Squizzle, I did try a external unit but this was no good without a firewire port! I had also heard the USB versions were prone to dropping frames due to lower transfer rates?? The "DVDtoAVI" software worked worked out OK in the end!
Brentsher - I was thinking of getting a VHS tape converted to DVD by 'a company' , then copying it to my pc to add menu's etc. Were you happy with the results of the company you gave the link for ? Im going this way because I cant seem to get good quality any other way. Two questions - 1 - The quality on my VHS tapes is good. Is there any loss of quality between the tape you give them and the DVD they produce ? 2 - Is there any loss of quality when you copy the DVD to pc , and then burn back to pc. Thanks for in advance for any help .
