DVD to Imovie

Home movies or commercial releases?

That's not a good route to go.  DVDs are a final product and to edit content from them, you have to convert to an editable format which results in a great deal of image degradation.

True but if he needs to get stuff HE MADE on a VHS camcorder to his PC using one of those boxes which converts it to DVD first isn't a bad way to go, quality is going to suck no matter how you look at it...

If you're talking commercial VHS tapes, I suggest simply re-buying on DVD. The quality will be superior.

if you're talking personal / home videos, you want a device that outputs directly to your computer. Using DVD as an intermediate step adds unnecessary complexity and possibly further image degradation.

What u need is a way to bridge your analog source into your Mac and then you can capture the video in iMovie. I do this with an old Canon DV camcorder that has an option to convert video out. Once you have the capture in iMovie you can export to iDVD and burn your disks. 

-EJ

Eric is on the right track.  There are many variations on how to do it, as far as equipment goes.  What I'm saying is, you will have severe loss of image quality if you go to DVD, then back to an editable format, edit, then back to DVD again.  DVDs are intended solely as the final product, not for further editing.  What you could do is produce final video DVDs, but also archive the editable (iMovie/IDVD) video files to DVD as computer files, then use those to do the recompilations.  Blank DVDs are so cheap, the cost would be minimal and the quality of the result would be infinitely better.

I'll add a slight counterpoint: if your goal is primarily to convert a number of VHS tapes to DVDs, then a direct converter box will be easier and faster. It will eliminate the re-authoring middle steps, saving time and effort. And if you didn't want to do any further editing, this is probably the best choice.

But if you want to do a reasonable bit of additional editing from these old videos, then going straight to your computer, and making DVDs later, will give more control and better final quality.

You can do cut-only editing with about a half-second accuracy without any re-encoding (which would degrade video quality). That is, instead of frame-accurate editing -- "I want to cut here" -- you might be forced to cut maybe a quarter-second before or after. It has to do with how DVDs are encoded.

So you can get the "push button" ease of converting the tapes to DVD -- it'll be done -- and then you can fiddle with editing your "best of" edition. You are stuck with the video quality that the converter gives you, which might be a plus because you don't tear your hair out trying to maximize the quality. You get what you get. Plus the box might have some tricks up its sleeve to goose up the picture to make it "better" (as opposed to accurate).

Note that neither iMovie or iDVD will help with this; they're designed for the camera-to-DVD workflow. You can probably get it done with the QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component ($20), MPEG Streamclip (free), and Roxio Toast ($80 -- hmm, expensive).

Looking at the Roxio site, they recently shipped a new product, "Easy VHS to DVD for Mac" (also $80, but it includes an older version of Toast). It includes a hardware converter gizmo, the type of thing that Eric mentioned. There are some technical differences with the traditional camera-oriented approach, but it will let you use iMovie, again with some loss in video quality. There are probably other similar products on the market.

So the questions sorta boil down to: do you already have some video equipment that can do the analog-to-digital conversion; how much is that Sony box; do you enjoy this sort of work; and finally, do you feel lucky? (Be sure to read product reviews, like on Amazon.)

But you can get DVD video into iMovie for editing, if you want. I don't recall if iMovie will read MPEG-2, I don't think so. But you can transcode to H264 with a free tool like MPEG StreamClip for subsequent use in iMovie, and then export to iDVD. (BTW: great free tool. I used it to convert MPEG-1 video from my digital camera to iMovie-compatible video for editing.)

I meant editing without transcoding and loss of quality. iMovie won't do the GOP-level cut-only editing that MPEG Streamclip does.

Looks like iMovie will import (and transcode) MPEG-2 from supported cameras. It was not immediately obvious to me how to get it to support "plain" MPEG-2 video files.

Quote:
Here's what I'd do:  Take the stack of tapes to Costco and let them do it for you.  No hardware to buy.  For the cost of one hardware tool you can get 10 tapes done and it's on their time, not yours.
http://www.costcodvd.com/services_and_pricing.aspx

That gets you your archival copy of the originals to a more permanent disk based backup.  Then you handbrake those from DVD to a digital file.  It's free and easy and going from VHS you are NOT going to notice the 1 generation loss.  Seriously. 
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/12987
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HandBrake


If you insist on doing it yourself however the best you can probably go for is Dazzle for the Mac:
http://www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSite/us/Products/Consumer+Products/Home+Video/Studio+Family/Video+Capture+for+Mac.htm
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3390786&CatId=1428

Either way you go, once you have done the above you can use iMovie to compile them together.

Sam

Another DIY product is the Eye TV Capture.
http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/products/Video-Capture/product1.en.html
-EJ

I did a lot of reading on VHS to PC conversion

and even something like the EYE TV CAPTURE
can only produce limited results when converting
to watch on a big screen.

In other words, from what I understand, the EYE

TV product is much better suited for stuff that is
going to be watched on smaller screens.

Now, don't quote me on that.  It's what I remember
reading and I never used the EYE TV product
(though I own their Hybrid USB TV Tuner).

What I ended up doing was going a rather
expensive route and bought the Canopus Converter
for about $200. BH PHOTO has it for a little less.

Now I am sure nobody wants to spend that
kind of money, but I looked at it as an
investment towards quality transfers.

I own about a dozen VHS tapes of family
movies I have taken as early as the late 80s.
I wanted something that would do a really
nice job of converting them to DVD without
any kind of degregation in quality. 

I read a lot of reviews of various products
and the Canopus came up several times
as being one of the very best converters.

Since buying the converter I have transferred
most of my VHS tapes to DVD and they
all look great.  I mean, you can't make a
VHS look any better on DVD, but you can
certainly prevent any further quality loss by
using really good equipment.

I am only suggesting this if the $200 seems
reasonable to you.   Go ahead and do a
search on conversion products and see how
some of these cheaper products don't make
the cut for watching on big devices. 

BTW, it works extremely well with iMovie. 
If your computer has Firewire 400 you just
plug it in to the port (which also powers it),
bring up iMovie and start importing.  When
done, you add chapter stops and export it
to iDVD to make the menus you need.
 

The fundamental technical difference between such products is the format/codec they capture to. The Canopus box captures to DV, suitable for editing. The EyeTV gizmo captures to H.264, suitable for iPod; some of their older boxes capture directly to DVD-compatible MPEG-2 (no transcoding).

Unless you click the wrong checkbox or something, they're all going to capture at 720x480, so nothing is "lost". Bitrate has a lot to do with quality. DV is constant high bitrate and "easier"; with the MPEGs the capability of the real-time encoders vary. You might quibble that DV uses 4:1:1 chroma subsampling, while NTSC DVD uses 4:2:0, so going from the one to the other can lead to "chunky" colors, but you may never notice this (and then once you do, waste all your time looking for it).

In the end, you might be best off going with reviews, and hopefully (somehow) go with people with similar levels of technical expertise, temperament, and visual acuity.

I don't really understand the difference, but the Dazzle DVD Recorder is on sale at BestBuy for $35. It looks like it uses a computer to convert and record directly to DVD. Which is what the original poster originally wanted :)

Instead of this old turn-of-the-century stuff dealing with converters and codecs yourself, you can embrace the next decade and try an online video editing/hosting/sharing services, like Pixorial. You send them your tapes, they convert them, you can edit them online, and then share the video with others just be emailing a link. Supposedly they will even burn a DVD for you.

If you are so brave as to try this, let us know how it turns out