I recently captured 90 hours of Hi-8 and VHS tape with a Canopus AVC-110. I used Cyberlink Power Director 7 as capture software saving the video as MPEG-2 files. Very quickly I noticed that I was going to run out of hard drive space. At 90 hours, I was looking at over 3 Terabytes of storage space to hold all of the videos, and I didn't want to deal with 50+ DVD's. So, as I went, I used Xilisoft Video Converter to take the MPEG-2 files to MPEG4 files (with de-interlance and 'highest' quality video and audio setting). On my computer and at the original reolsution, the videos looked great. 90 hours ended up only taking around 95GB of storage space (down from my MPEG2 estimate of 3+TB). Now that I'm seeing these MP4's on an LCD, they look really horrible. I know that VHS/HI-8 on a 720p LCD get stretched out about 67% and that is that cause of most of the apperance. Was I stupid to convert the MPEG-2's into MPEG-4's? I didn't see being able to store and maintain 3+TB's at the time but maybe I should have just burned the MPEG-2 files off onto DVD's to save the original quality. I don't want to re-rip all the tapes though - that was brutal.
Is it just the aspect ratio that's at issue? Or is the image otherwise "messy"? If it's the aspect ratio alone (say, for example, you want 4:3 source material from the Hi-8 & VHS tapes to display properly in 16:9 such that a perfect circle in the 4:3 source is displayed on a wide-screen 16:9 TV as a perfect circle too), then there are several software apps which can perform the aspect-ratio conversion (such as, for example, Corel's VideoStudio X2, and strictly as a guess, the freeware VLC 1.0.1 player/converter). But if your complaint is regarding some other image quality options, I'm afraid I don't know how to advise you... So I'm interested in the answers you receive from others, too.
Oh, and for future reference, there's an extremely wonderful way to capture 4:3 source material and have it converted to true, full wide-screen 16:9 aspect ratio in real-time at the highest possible quality. You'd use the "embedded processing" aspect-ratio signal insertion feature (e.g., "IEC 16:9 Full widescreen" option (or something with similar wording)) of the Enosoft DV Processor to capture to 16:9 type-1 DV files, which are very large files (so you'll need to capture to an NTFS volume), but they don't suffer from any image quality degradation such as you would get if you captured to DVD/MPEG-2 files first. After the capture of, say, a full Hi-8, VHS, or Beta tape (I still love my old Sony SuperBeta HiFi SL-HF900 for it's fantastic image quality for a 20-year old machine!), then you convert it to DVD/MPEG-2 format for watching it on a 16:9 full widescreen (i.e., no letterboxing -or- sidebars) TV. It took me about a year to find a way to do that, but I finally succeeded! Just remember to DISABLE the "16:9 Aspect Ratio Conversion" checkbox on the main page. That's what screwed me up for so long!
no letterboxing or sidebars.. fine.. if you like everybody squashed and fat... I call that serious image degradation myself.
::: sigh ::: I do wish more people had better reading comprehension. Please re-read this part of what I wrote: "say, for example, you want 4:3 source material from the Hi-8 & VHS tapes to display properly in 16:9 such that a perfect circle in the 4:3 source is displayed on a wide-screen 16:9 TV as a perfect circle too" Need I really explain that if you get a perfect circle without letterboxing or sidebars in both (which you DO with the technique I described, but ONLY if you do what I described) necessarily implies that you CANNOT end up with "everybody squashed and fat"?
