Transferring home movies to PC hard drive... (1 Viewer)

[Darren Oleski]

Hi -
I apologize for posting this question in this part of the forum, but I did not get a response in the Home Theater PC area.
I would like to know of the best place and/or website to gather information on equipment needed to transfer vhs home movies to one's hard drive.
Thanks,
Darren

 

[Ray R]

I have seen adapters that connect a computer and video equipment through a USB/RCA connection. I believe they cost around $80, but you will still need some type of software. BHphoto.com has a wide selection of computer video equipment. A phone call to them might get you pointed in the right direction.

 

[james e m]

Check out some of the Ziff Davis sites or some computer magazines for info. No matter what, you're going to need an RCA card installed in your computer, so check out some computer magazine reviews to find out what will work the best for you. A word of warning, you need A TON of space on your hard drive to do store/edit movies. Keep that in mind.
james
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When in doubt...Rock it out.

 

[Luciano Pires]

Hi Darren,
Depends on your budget.
There are a few things you’ll have to consider.
Quality and hard drive (HD) space. The higher quality you capture your home movies the more HD space you’ll need.
What are you trying to do?
Do you want just to safe archive you home movies, capturing them and then burning them on to cdrom.
Are you planning on editing your movies? Then output them back to tape.
Check outwww.pinnaclesys.com The DC30pro is a very good video capture card that you might want to take a look at. It’s about $449.99.
Here’s the description: DC30pro
DC30 Pro is a full-featured digital video editing system. Add custom titles to your productions with Pinnacle Systems’ TitleDeko software. Includes Adobe Premiere 5.1 and 300 unique Pixélan Software Video SpiceRack transitions. For convenient desktop audio and video connections, DC30 Pro ships with a high quality breakout box.
There are other models better than this one (more expensive) and lower end models (cheaper) from the same company, but if you want a good capture card with lots of options the DC30pro is it.
Another one is the Canopus DVRaptor Check it out atLink Removed
As you get more involved with editing and saving your home movies, you might want to check these out. www.draco.com check the Casablanca Avio model (Under $2K) or the Casablanca Classic.
Check the iFinish at www.media100.com
Hope the info helps… good luck.
LP
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[Edited last by Luciano Pires on July 19, 2001 at 07:50 AM]

 

[Darren Oleski]

Thanks to Luciano, and to the other respondees. I am most interested in safe archiving my home videos. I will check the products you have listed, Luciano.
Another question. How much hard drive space does it take to store, say, a minute of video from a vhs tape? I know quality and resolution play a big part, but what is a ballpark estimate?
Thanks!

 

[george king]

Interesting question, as I am in the middle of doing this. I have a DV camera, and I have tried a straight download of max quality (large video window) in an avi format. 1 minute would be about 50 megs. I do not know how this would relate to tape, but it may give you a rough idea.
Hope this helps.

 

[Mike LS]

That depends, like you said, on quality of recording, but more than that, it depends on what type of file you're saving your videos to.
The are at least a dozen poplular video file types out there, from .mpg, .avi, .mov, to DIVX and others. All vary in their quality and in their file size.
When recoding from an analog source, .mpg is probably your best bet (in my limited computer knowledge anyhow).
As mentioned above, you'll have to drop a good chunk of $$ on a video card with compatible inputs and enough memory to keep up with 2 hours of video capture.
As far as software......I in no way know what all is out there, but I have a program called PowerVCR II that would do what you're wanting. It's a great video capture and encoding program and would most likely fit the bill for what you want.
I think you might could find a demo of this software on most any download site likewww.zd.net/download orLink Removed (don't worry admins....these are legit sites that offer freeware, shareware and demos).
I'm not %100 that this proggy is on these sites, but if not, you could do a search and find the company's site to get pricing on a full version.
Something else you might think about doing is getting yourself a seperate hard drive for storing and editing these videos. As it has been said, a movie takes up a butt-load of space. Example: A DVD ripped to DIVX format will usually take about 1GB of HD space once it's encoded, but just to take the files off of the disc and put them on your PC as a temp file for encoding takes upwards of 10GB for most movies.
Now this doesn't really apply to what you're wanting to do with tapes, but you need to have at least 1GB of free space for each approx. 2 hour movie you want to store.
Hope this helps.

 

[JohnRyan]

I used the Studio DC10 Plus from Pinnacle systems. It seemed to work fine. It was $100 for the software and card.
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"I've got to get me one of them DVD rewinders!"

 

[EdM]

Darren, I have been doing home video on the pc for the past 2 years. I use the Matrox Marvel G400 video card and have had very good results.
Here is a site that can swamp you with information and most likely take care of all your questions.http://forums.matroxusers.com/
Go to the Desktop Video board and take a look.
I have found another option for my videos. http://www.lifeclips.com
This company puts home video on dvd. I will be sending a tape to them this week. If it looks good, they will get all of mine to transfer to dvd.
Hope this helps,
Ed
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[Edited last by EdM on July 20, 2001 at 04:23 AM]

 

[Darren Oleski]

Thanks again to all of you for your extremely helpful suggestions! I will use these resources to help me transfer twenty years of home videos to a digital format.
This forum is a gem.

 

[Stacy Huff]

I've been thinking of doing this same type thing, and one thing I've considered doing is getting myself a FireWire external hard drive to store the video info for editing. You may want to look into something like that.
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"Are you a pothead, Focker?"