Re: VHS tapes and DVDs
- From: "Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2006 00:51:57 -0700
Chrono1st wrote:
You do indeed make a very good point. Thank you for the warning... hmmm, yeah I can see myself getting pretty bogged down a while into the process. I'm a very committed person, and I'm mostly doing this as a favor for a very important friend of mine, but I also see your point about "time allocated to the task" vs. "results".
If I were doing this, after about 40-50 hours and three computer
crashes, I would begin to feel like it was less a labor of love than
an obligation. Ten hours and another crash later, I would start
wondering if my mind-numbing efforts would be properly appreciated.
Ten hours after that, after running out of disk space, I would begin
to resent my friend and myself for the huge effort I am already
committed to...
The next time I saw him, I'd tell him to "keep his damn tapes!" ;-)
Sorry--I coudn't resist. ;-)
But the point is that this is going to take a *long* time, and it is
*not* going to go smoothly. If things go quite well, there will be
long stretches of boredom punctuated by intense frustration.
The journey of a thousand miles is best begun with a call to a
travel agent. ;-)
Seriously, anything you can do to reduce your time investment and
the potential for Murphy's Law adventures is *very much* worth doing--
particularly if you can achieve excellent results without a lot of
pain.
Is editing the commercials the only really hard part? Even if I don't do that, I'd still like to set up DVD chapters. Is setting up chapters require a large amount of work, and all of the editing tools, or can I do it easier? I guess what I'm thinking is, if I need to buy all this stuff just to set up chapters, well, I'll already have the equipment and might give editing commercials a go. However, if I can just set up chapters fairly easily, without tons and tons of special equipment, maybe I'll just skip the commercials.
DVD recorders support defining "chapters" and "titles".
If you are actually watching the tapes as you are dubbing, you can
arrange to create titles and/or chapters at places you see fit, even
if you are recording to a write-once ("R") disc.
If you prefer to dub the tapes "blind", only manually starting (and
perhaps stopping) the process, then if you use "RW" discs, most DVD
recorders offer a way to create chapter/title boundaries after the
disc is recorded (including the Philips). This process has the
advantage that you can skip through the recorded disc several
minutes at a time to find the spots where title splits are
appropriate. (On the Philips recorders, a default chapter is
inserted every 5 minutes.)
After capturing the tape on a disc, you can copy it to "R" media
for your and your friend's libraries.
(BTW, don't throw the tapes away. I have VHS tapes that have lasted
more than 25 years, and DVDs that have lasted less than a year. ;-)
We all hope that those are anomalies, but who *really* knows?)
Oh, about the way you do "dubbing", using a Phillips DVD recorder: If I do it that way, will the DVDs be at 100% the quality and information level that they were on VHS? I'm really sorry if I seem dense about this... Because I'm doing this as a favor for an important friend of mine, I don't want the DVDs to have either less detailed pictures, lower quality, smaller pictures, ect. Even a subtle decrease in quality or detail is something I want to avoid, if possible. If the recording way you are talking about leaves the pictures at 100% their original detail and quality, then that actually might be a great plan for me.
The answer to your question needs to be understood in the context of
the not-very-good quality of any extended-play VHS tape.
If you have SP (2 hour) VHS tapes, then dubbing them to a DVD at the
2-hour/disc setting will produce *excellent* results. This DVD mode
is actually much better than *any* VHS mode, and no degradation will
be visible--in fact, the time-base correction that the DVD recorder
does automatically will noticeably improve the quality over the tapes.
If you have EP (6 hour) VHS tapes, they can be dubbed to one DVD in the
6-hour/disc mode. This will result in a reduction in digital resolution
from 720 pixels/line to 360 pixels/line (in the Philips case), which is
*still* substantially better than a EP VHS tape. (And an EP VHS tape
has much more time-base error than an SP tape, so the improvement on
this score in going to a DVD will be significant.)
In short, you should not experience any reduction in resolution in
dubbing one tape to one disc, even though the quality setting of the
DVD recorder must be lowered to accommodate the slower tape speed.
The ultimate arbiter of viewing quality is your own experience.
DVD recorders have dropped in price remarkably in the last year.
An excellent current model is well under $200, and my last purchase
was an older "factory reconditioned" model to match the one I usually
use--it was about $60.
Considering the amount of personal time involved in this undertaking,
a modest investment in a *very* useful device seems justified.
Thank you so much for your advice!
I hope it's useful to you. I have done some similar things, and
learned from experience that the PC was not the best way to do
the job. ;-(
"Good judgement comes from experience,
and experience comes from poor judgement."
-michael
"Michael J. Mahon" wrote:
Before you charge headlong down the path of capturing all these tapes to
your computer, editing them, and then burning them to DVD, think a bit
about how boring this is going to be around a third of the way into your
hundreds of hours of video.
Unless you have a compulsive streak a mile wide, you are going to be
sorry you ever started this! ;-)
It is *much* easier to simply "dub" the tapes to a DVD recorder. Many
DVD recorders offer "long play" options with resolution comparable to
VHS tapes that are still considerably better than 6-hour VHS mode, so
that you could get entire tapes on a single disk. I use a Phillips
DVD recorder, and it offers a 6-hour and even an 8-hour mode with
VHS-level resolution.
Although you cannot expect any resolution enhancement from a transfer,
all DVD recorders will do "time base correction" which corrects the
small horizontal "jiggles" from line to line that are a major quality issue with video tapes. This correction alone can considerably improve
the viewing quality of the tapes.
Removing commercials may not be very important when the DVDs are viewed,
since DVD players allow "fast forward" to get through them quickly.
With real-time sporting events, unlike other shows, time is usually
passing during the commercial breaks, so editing out the commercials
still leaves a discontinuity that is quite recognizable during viewing.
I think you will find that simply dubbing the tapes to DVD will be
*very* much easier and more troublefree, and will produce a quite
satisfactory viewing experience.
-michael
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it is seriously underused."
.
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