Is OT but not entirely I hope (he says clutching keyboard tightly)... Now that VHS videos machines are being given the boot (by Dixons I think - so that's that then), I was wondering what would be the best/cheapest way to get my videos onto dvd? I see there are combined dvd/vhs cassette machines available but am right in thinking these won't actually write the dvd from the vhs tape? Also I suppose writable dvd's are ££££ more thatn non-rewritable ones. Could I perhaps use my PC to do the transfer - dvd writer. but how to I get the vhs signal onto it?
What does the grp think of those combined dvd/video machines (copying aside)? Are they good value or is there some show-stopping reason not to get one? tia
I use the following method (Because I had the kit anyway!)
VCR connected to the AV input of my Sony DCR-TRV30e camcorder (No tape in the camcorder) FireWire cable from camcorder to PC Put the camcorder in playback mode Press capture in Pinnacle Studio Press Play on the VCR Wait ages! Edit, and burn to DVDR
It depends which one you buy. There are combination VHS tape and DVD player machines that won't do what you want because the DVD part is playback only.
There are a small number of combined VCR and DVD recorders on the market.
I was looking for the same thing a few months ago after my VCR packed up. I wanted something to transfer video tapes periodically as well as to be able to record to DVD anyway, often so that I have some things to watch when I'm travelling. German,Norwegian,.... TV gets a bit boring after a while and BBC News24 a touch repetitive. For this application I wanted to make DVDs that will play on a notebook PC.
After a bit of looking, I settled on a Panasonic DMRE75VEBS (costs about £290).
This has two TV tuners and supports almost all of the different DVD media types. I have a fairly good Sony DVD player as well and would say that the DVD player is not quite as functional but quality is as good.
VHS tape to DVD transfer is done by internal connection and the quality is quite a bit better than via external cable connections - even component or SVHS.
If you mean the media, yes. I tend to use DVD-R disks which are pretty cheap and I don't really care about using them again. On the machine I have, you can part record the disk and add more, but it is only playable on the machine itself until it has been finalised and an index added. Then it can be played on a PC.
I have a setup that will do that as well with quite a good capture card that I mainly use with the video camera, but it would do this job. If you have a good fast hard disk and a decent capture card you can achieve results that are comparable to the combined VCR and DVD recorder, but it does need to be a good capture card - the £50 budget ones are not that good and with a reasonable VHS tape you can see the difference.
I think they are a good buy if you want something that gives pretty good quality and is easy to use.
Curry's may have dropped VHS machines - probably because they can't make enough profit out of them - but I'll bet they'll be around for a long time.
can't see any benefit in a combined machine - you can simply plug a DVD recorder into your VHS and copy from that. If they both have Scart sockets it's pretty straightforward.
Smaller space, dubbing quality is a bit better....... Pricing was about the same as an equivalent DVD recorder (only) so if the old VCR was class F, then it does make sense.
It depends on the video card, codec used and amount of compression. The transfer and compression time is often many times real time. A DVD recorder works in real time apart from a few seconds when finalising a disk.
DVD-Rs will store up to 8hrs with compression (on my recorder at least). Mileage may vary with PCs. Generally I use mine at the 2hr rate for best quality - the disks are cheap enough.
Best is not going to be cheapest, but will depend a bit on what you already have. Cheapest DVD writer is one for a computer. These can be had for under 40 quid now (even a top end 12x Plextor is only about 60 quid). However that means you need a way to get the film onto the computer. As somone else suggested, you may have a camcorder with firewire that could do it for you, or, you could get a video capture card. You can also get firewire equiped external video digitizers, but these are still a bit pricy.
The simpler method may be a consumer DVD recorder deck, then in theory you can plug the VCR into the deck with a scart lead and hit record on one, and play on the other. I say "in theory", because there may be a few other hurdles to jump. If the material you want to transfer is a commercially produced VHS tape, then chances are it will be protected by Macrovision. Hence you will need a small box of tricks inserted between the VHS and DVDR to strip this.
DVDR disks are pretty cheap now, no need to pay more than say 8 quid for
25 in a cake box.
If you want a smaller one box solution they are OK. Note that most of the first generation of these machines are DVD playback only at the moment.
I've got an S-VHS recorder, and this transfers to DVD with no loss of quality - although you'll still get the artifacts inherent in the DVD system, of course.
With a DVD recorder you can set the quality level. On mine, you'll get near indistinguishable quality from Freeview at the best level which allows only 1 hour. 3 hour is about good VHS. Although since the 'problems' are different, you'd really have to judge for yourself which suits you.
Another related question which I have is that of formats. Quite apart from the many flavours of physical DVD media which are out there, there seem to be lots of ways (MPEG etc.) of actually encoding the video data.
I have lots of Hi-8 (SVHS equivalent) video footage which I would like to digitise and edit on the computer. I don't want to buy an expensive capture card for a one-off exercise. If I were to buy a DVD recorder as a replacement for my ageing VCR, what are the chances that I could use it to capture my video to DVD in a form which I can then edit on the computer?
You could run a DVD ripper program on the DVD to extract MPEG2 files from it. Then you should be able to edit it in a video editing package before finally reauthoring back to DVD (so you will want a DVD writer on the PC (+ loads of RAM and hard drive space, and a decent processor))
There are a whole range of codecs that can be used on a PC.
For example, you could rip/decrypt a DVD to a disk file - then you can re-encode that in a variety of different formats like MPEG-4, Windows Media, Real, DivX and so on. This would be useful if you wanted a small file for web use or to save space on the PC. It will play on the PC. However, there is one specific flavour of MPEG-2 that can be recorded onto a DVD medium and played on a stand alone DVD player.
That you can do because you would just cable up from your camera to the DVD recorder and record the disk.
Then take the disk and put in your PC and proceed as before. There is editing software around that will allow you to edit with that as a source and write back to DVD at the end.
Generally though, for video editing you need a big disk and fast PC because it is heavy number crunching behind the scenes.
Depends on what you mean by loss. The main problems with DVD tend to be in movement and a smaller number of colours. In terms of definition and noise it beats domestic tape hands down.
Are you saying that the DVD recorder would record my video in a format which would be acceptable as input to the video editor? If so, what format would that be?
If not, what software would I need to "rip" it into something acceptable. I have Pinnacle Studio 8 SE - which came bundled with something or other - which can take input from a DV camera or from a video capture card, but there's no obvious way of getting it to read from a file - even though it can apparantly save to various file formats including AVI, MPEG, Real and WindowsMedia.
I have an AMD Athlon 2600 processor and 100GB disk, plus an extermal 250GB firewire disk. Is this good enough?
It depends on the video editor and the codecs that it will support.
The transfer would be for the DVD to be loaded into the PC and to read from that. If it were a commercial DVD it will be encrypted and that is the purpose for ripping software. Obviously in some countries this may be breaking copyright.
Such decryption software is readily available if you do a Google search. THe result is a disk file that you may be able to edit.
You can test this out by taking a normal DVD disk and ripping it to disk.
It's hard to say. The most common working codec to use for editing in these environments is Motion JPEG or MJPEG, although some editors will work on others. MJPEG tends to be used because it is effectively a sequence of JPEG images (24-30/second) with all of the information in each frame. The MPEG and other codecs typically employ both spatial and temporal compression - the latter being that some optimisation is done from frame to frame as well as within frames. This makes effects and editing harder to do and often the effects are limited to simple butt edits - i.e. straight scene changes. Therefore you may find that it's necessary to transcode from say the DVD MPEG2 format to MJPEG or a proprietary one before editing and then back again afterwards.
Unless you have a graphics card with hardware support for transcoding this can be a very long process - 10:1 in terms of time is typical.
You really need to look through the card and software documentation to see what they do, but at least you can try it out before buying the DVD recorder.
The video record will create a standard DVD with .VOB files containing the video/audio plus some .ifo files to control the menu etc. I don't think pinnacle will read this directly. Depending on your source DVD (i.e. commercial / home recorded) you may not be able to copy the files from it directly, however a program like SmartRipper (freeware) will slap a complete copy onto a hard drive in about 10 mins on your spec computer. It will also remove any region protection or macrovision in the process. ;-)
You may need a pre processing step to convert the DVD image into a file format you can read. Pinnacle can read various file formats in the editing window - you just load them as clips, and the assemble them into your project. When happy you can then render the lot back into a DVD images and record it. This last stage can be pretty slow (i.e. 5 to 10 hours for a full DVD).
If you just was to assemble various bits of footage on the same DVD without being able to do frame by frame editing, then you can do this quite quickly with programs like DVDShrink. This will take complete programs from multiple DVDs if required and splat them onto a DVD. This is quite quick (say 30 mins for a full DVD including recording time). As its name suggests DVDShrink will also allow you to vary the compression when transcoding. This allows you to fit more on a disk than you otherwise would be able to.
Yup, it will do for starters. As I discovered, video editing will take all the hardware you can muster, burp, and say "Gimmy more!".
Only if you pander to their marketing hype it is, as if they know what they are talking about in any case, if it was true don't you think that their sister companies would also be emptying their shelves...
They want you to buy standalone DVD writers, because they will make more profit on them, as they are still able to sell with a price hike.
I'm not an expert on these editing systems, but I gather that the new standard for working in is Wavelet rather than MJPEG as the pixelation loss is considerably better. I'm currently using MJPEG for recording and the definition loss is quite significant when you compare the original with the recording. Just a comment.
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