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Sam Valenti · May 21, 2004, 06:45 AM

I am tring to figure out the quickest way to transfer my home VHS tapes to DVD without going thru imovie or idvd. (I have a converter box) Once I get them on DVD I will go thru them and make iMovies with editing and sound etc. My first priority is to get them to DVD to preserve the content and quality. I have been doing iMovies for several years and just began iDVD so I pretty much understand that process. I have used HP's DVD writer that has a straight "down and dirty" transfer, unfortunately it is for PC's only and it uses DVD+R format.

k_munic · May 21, 2004, 07:33 AM

the material on a dvd CAN'T be used easily for editing them later. the pics & sounds are "muxxed" (=mpeg2) which is a non-editable video-format.

so, if you decide to transfer your vhs material think about that! - there're prgs out there (look at versiontracker for something like dvd2dv) to make all this re-decoding (quality is fine, not worse then vhs

..) but it needs HOURS to make a muxxed mpeg2 stream into a .dv-stream with sound...-

have look at toast6 - it offers a "direct to dvd" feature, which means, you have to input your material with some kind of converter or whatever and all the encoding/muxxing/menus is done by toast automatically - but again, that needs time... oh, you said G5 dual-proc? ok, minutes...

Sam Valenti · May 21, 2004, 11:05 AM

Thanks! Very good information.

boardsurfer · May 22, 2004, 01:01 AM

Sam, why go straight to DVD if you are going to edit in iMovie anyway? At some point in that process, your movies will be DV, you might as well do your iMovie stuff right then. You are making things unnecessarily complicated by having to re-import/rip/whatever it takes to get DVD on your machine. Once your VHS is on your computer, you no longer have to worry about degradation from the tapes.

Sam Valenti · May 22, 2004, 08:03 AM

I realize that I am creating an extra step. I have about 20 vhs tapes with 2 - 6 hours of movies on them from the past 25 years. I also have about 40 video hi 8 tapes that I would like to convert to DVD. In the past I have done exactly what you are suggesting and created my imovie as I brought them in from the vhs. I figured if I created DVD's I could be better organized, search faster and find what I want to edit easier plus make sure my tapes are preserved until I get a chance to create new imovies. That is why I was hoping that there would be a simple and quick software program that would allow me to dump the tapes to dvd.

dlefebvre · May 22, 2004, 10:11 AM

DVD's MPEG2 cannot be edited not only because the files are muxxed, the nature of DVD compression is also very different fromt DV. Instead of being compressed frame by frame, the video is compressed by group of pictures (GOP) and the compression rate is variable. This type of compression is not compatible with editing systems. Also it's not suggested to go back and forth between lossy compression formats. Not only is it long and tedious, there is quality loss at every step. There are a few converters that directly convert any video to a DV stream. That's the way to go if you want to edit the material before the final output.

Uncle Skeleton · May 22, 2004, 12:00 PM

Originally posted by Sam Valenti:
I realize that I am creating an extra step. I have about 20 vhs tapes with 2 - 6 hours of movies on them from the past 25 years. I also have about 40 video hi 8 tapes that I would like to convert to DVD. In the past I have done exactly what you are suggesting and created my imovie as I brought them in from the vhs. I figured if I created DVD's I could be better organized, search faster and find what I want to edit easier plus make sure my tapes are preserved until I get a chance to create new imovies. That is why I was hoping that there would be a simple and quick software program that would allow me to dump the tapes to dvd.

You might want to invest in a nice firewire hard drive and dump all your DV files there, and name the files well (and keep it in a safe place). It's a little more money, but your time is valuable too, and swapping DVDs, making sure they all don't get scratched, and converting back and forth between MPEG-2 and DV (both of which are lossy formats) is going to be a huge pain (it's a huge pain for 1 disc, let alone 20, or 60 if you want to edit the hi 8 tapes too). Plus at the end you have an extra hard drive. Blank DVDs are roughly $2 each and hold only 4 hours, so that's about $80 saved just from the VHS tapes (again, I don't know what you intend to do with the hi 8 or how much footage is on each one).

Sam Valenti · May 22, 2004, 10:02 PM

Thanks to everyone for the information. Ok. I have two external firewire drives 80 gig each. I have a sony DVMC-DA1 converter (which is not suppose to work with my G5), but it seems to work fine. I am a little confused, I have been using the firewire and converter to create iMovies. I have been adding pictures, transitions, audio etc for a finished product. It sounds like you are suggesting to continue to do this except leave out the transitions, etc and just play the tapes onto the firewire drives and pull them back to the internal drives as I need them when I want to make a completed edited project. Is that the jest of what boardsurfer, Uncle Skelton and dlefebvre are suggesting? Or is there another way to get DV streaming files?

Uncle Skeleton · May 22, 2004, 10:44 PM

Basically yes. Digital is digital; all you want is to ditigize now before the tapes degrade (if they're going to). What you want to do is edit them all and make DVDs, but you don't have the time to do all the editing now (right?), so you're asking what to do with the digital video until you do have time. The options are (1) what you suggested, which is to compress them to MPEG-2 on DVDs, then recompress back to DV for editing when you have time. This will take a lot of time and a lot of DVDs, and lose a little video (and audio I guess) quality. The other option (2) is to store the DV files somewhere until you can edit them. The disadvantage of this is that you'll need a mighty big hard drive to store them all (80 hours will take up about a terabyte of hard drive space in DV format). Actually, it might be best to find a way to dump them onto DV tape, which is also digital and probably a lot cheaper per GB than a hard drive. What it boils down to is that this is a very big project and it's not going to be easy...

k_munic · May 23, 2004, 03:31 AM

Originally posted by Sam Valenti:
Thanks to everyone for the information. Ok. I have two external firewire drives 80 gig each. I have a sony DVMC-DA1 converter (which is not suppose to work with my G5), but it seems to work fine. I am a little confused, I have been using the firewire and converter to create iMovies. I have been adding pictures, transitions, audio etc for a finished product. It sounds like you are suggesting to continue to do this except leave out the transitions, etc and just play the tapes onto the firewire drives and pull them back to the internal drives as I need them when I want to make a completed edited project. Is that the jest of what boardsurfer, Uncle Skelton and dlefebvre are suggesting? Or is there another way to get DV streaming files?

as uncle sceleton mentioned: 1 h of video needs approx. 12Gigs of hd as .dv-stream...

so, solution 1): keep the movies on vhs

no kiddin: that's the cheapest and easiest way to storage that amount of data.
solution 2) get a mini-dv camcorder with analog-video-in - transfer all your tapes on mini-dv tape - that's done in real time; for further processeing them in your mac, you need another real time ...

solution 3) some commercial services offer the transfer of "old" standards" (video 8, 16mm etc) on dvd - you have no hussel, but have to pay for it.

what i would do:
keep'm on tape; get a VERY big hd; when you start a project, digitize ONE tape, edit it, burn it.

don't worry about "fading" away vhs - the next 5 years your tapes will be ok - if you storage them NOT besides a subwoofer (magnetic field), an aircondition (humidity) or a 3 years old child ("...look daddy, it's all brown!" - original quote from my son)

Talk2Angus · May 24, 2004, 03:53 AM

You might want to invest in a nice firewire hard drive and dump all your DV files there, and name the files well (and keep it in a safe place). It's a little more money, but your time is valuable too, and swapping DVDs, making sure they all don't get scratched, and converting back and forth between MPEG-2 and DV (both of which are lossy formats) is going to be a huge pain (it's a huge pain for 1 disc, let alone 20, or 60 if you want to edit the hi 8 tapes too). Plus at the end you have an extra hard drive. Blank DVDs are roughly $2 each and hold only 4 hours, so that's about $80 saved just from the VHS tapes (again, I don't know what you intend to do with the hi 8 or how much footage is on each one).

Uncle Skeleton · May 24, 2004, 12:21 PM

copycat