Video Capturing Guide at Ars Technica

Deffexor writes "For those of you who read Ars Technica, but do not visit our forum, we have an active Audio/Visual Club where we talk shop about everything ranging from TVs to Stereos to Speakers to Videocards and everything in between. Lately, there has been a lot of interest in capturing broadcast television and converting old VHS home movies to a more timeless digital format, such as VCD, SVCD, and DVD. As more and more people become interested, it becomes increasingly difficult to educate everyone on how to do this properly. Tapping the collective consciousness of the Ars A/V forum, we bring you the 1st part of the Ars Technica Guide to Video Capturing, Cleaning, and Compression."

Comments

Buy drives. Lots and lots of drives.

[chiph]

I've been working on doing this very same thing - transferring some 8" & 12" laserdiscs that will never be released on a modern format (80's music videos, mostly).

One thing I've saw is that the article specifies a 40gb hard drive as a minimum. That's laughably small. I have twin 80gb drives spanned via RAID, and I filled them up with most of one side of a movie (about 50 minutes of video). Not only do I need more room for the 2nd side of the movie, I also need room for producing the final DVD MPEG files before burning them. Next paycheck I'm buying a couple of 200gb drives to replace them with, and I'm concerned that even they might not be large enough.

It also doesn't hurt to have the fastest CPU available. I'm on a Athlon XP 1800, and mastering/producing takes longer than the source material is (15min of material takes ~20min to produce). Don't think dual CPUs will help, as the production process is pretty much single-threaded.

Chip H.

Re:Linux

[Christopher Bibbs]

If you add firewire and use an external capture device (like a DV camera or DV bridge) you can do quite a bit with an older processor. However, any video editing you attempt will be slow and painful. If I use my XP 2000+ to edit things go fast enough to not make it bothersome, but rendering can still take awhile. I've also used my wife's dual G4 and while it isn't any faster, the OS and software is so much better to work with, you wouldn't believe it.

Personally, I'd prefer Linux to finish polishing the end user experience for Office and Desktop Publishing software (because that's what I use most) before getting into the video editing relm.

Re:Buy drives. Lots and lots of drives.

[fruey]

If you're using that much space, then you're capturing everything as AVI no compression.

Use at least a lossless compressor like HuffYUV or even, with a good machine, you could DivX or something on the fly at a high bitrate, and you /could/ even capture the audio in MP3 directly, or else just at 44.1Khz/16bit.

There's no way you should be needing that much hard disk space for a 50 min capture. I only have 80 Gig in all, and I captured and compressed a 2 hour film in MPEG-1 format, high quality, on the fly, on a PII - 350MHz @ 400x300 or something around that don't remember the exact figure. If I had a better CPU I could do better resolution and MPEG-2 on the fly.