Opinions on video capture alternatives

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I have a set-top Toshiba unit that will dub my VHS tapes to to DVD. I
want to edit those DVD videos. My question is whether I would be
better off, from a quality standpoint, using a video capture device
directly into my PC or use the VHS-DVD dubbing on the set-top box?
Will there be any improvement in quality going directly into my PC?

Thanks!

 

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<bdinic@mchsi.com> wrote in message
news:1107834686.058319.10480@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
>I have a set-top Toshiba unit that will dub my VHS tapes to to DVD. I
> want to edit those DVD videos. My question is whether I would be
> better off, from a quality standpoint, using a video capture device
> directly into my PC or use the VHS-DVD dubbing on the set-top box?
> Will there be any improvement in quality going directly into my PC?
>
> Thanks!
>

Probably not, in fact some standalone recorders are very
optimized and have some good analog processing before
feeding their encoder, so they can have a slight advantage
over a PC card/box with a hardware encoder. This is
especially true in a $ for $ comparison. They usually are
somewhat lacking in editing & menu creation capabilities,
but you can use a RW Disk to bring your video to the PC;
and do your editing & authoring there. You can normally
convert a tape to a DVD unattended and "off-line" from
your PC.

Where the PC approach can make headway is in terms
of the control you can have over the process. Also, if you
are willing to trade an inordinate amount of time for an
improvement in quality, you can capture to a less compressed
format on the PC then use a multi-pass encoding with filters,
to make the DVD Compatible MPEG needed for a DVD.

Luck;
Ken

 

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David McCall gave me the following advice to a similar post I had:

If you really believe that you want to edit them later, then burning to
DVD
isn't going to give the desired end result. Making copies on DV would
make more sense. DV can be easily loaded into a computer for later
editing. The problem with DVDs is that they are MPEG-2 encoded at
very high compression. It's truly remarkable that it looks as good as
it
does, considering the compression. The problem is the way delta
compression works.

In Mpeg-2, as used on a DVD, most frames don't have a full image on
them. They only have parts of the image that are moving or changing.
There are "I" frames every so often that are complete frames. They
tend to happen when sop much of the image is changing that a delta
frame would actually be bigger, or at a pre-determined interval if not
much is happening.

This is fine for playback, but not for editing. In order to shuttle
backwards
and make edits at will, the editing software would have to build
buffers of
frames between each set of I frames to give you random access.
Otherwise you wouldn't be able to make cuts except on I frames.
I'm told that it can be done.

The other problem is the clincher though. Every time you recompress,
you loose quality, in much the same manner as you do with VHS. DV
treats every image as a complete frame so all of the compression takes
place within each frame. This makes DV much more friendly as an
editing medium. It would be better to edit the DV and then make the
DVDs from the edited material.

 

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<mdindestin@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1107861118.568728.282090@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> David McCall gave me the following advice to a similar post I had:
>
> If you really believe that you want to edit them later, then burning to
> DVD
> isn't going to give the desired end result. Making copies on DV would
> make more sense. DV can be easily loaded into a computer for later
> editing. The problem with DVDs is that they are MPEG-2 encoded at
> very high compression. It's truly remarkable that it looks as good as
> it
> does, considering the compression. The problem is the way delta
> compression works.
>
> In Mpeg-2, as used on a DVD, most frames don't have a full image on
> them. They only have parts of the image that are moving or changing.
> There are "I" frames every so often that are complete frames. They
> tend to happen when sop much of the image is changing that a delta
> frame would actually be bigger, or at a pre-determined interval if not
> much is happening.
>
> This is fine for playback, but not for editing. In order to shuttle
> backwards
> and make edits at will, the editing software would have to build
> buffers of
> frames between each set of I frames to give you random access.
> Otherwise you wouldn't be able to make cuts except on I frames.
> I'm told that it can be done.
>
Yes it can, and is done, in milliseconds.

> The other problem is the clincher though. Every time you recompress,
> you loose quality, in much the same manner as you do with VHS. DV
> treats every image as a complete frame so all of the compression takes
> place within each frame. This makes DV much more friendly as an
> editing medium. It would be better to edit the DV and then make the
> DVDs from the edited material.
>

It depends on what the OP means when he said that he wanted
"to edit those DVD videos". If the editing consists of cutting and
joining, or removing parts, then no recompression is needed. If
his intention were to change the actual image data then that would
be different, but that's true no matter what the compression of the
video. There are several inexpensive frame accurate MPEG NLE,
my favorite is VideoReDo www.VideoReDo.com These editors
only "recompress" the 1/2sec GOP involved in the cut. That
"recompression" could be considered "lossless" as there is no
change in the digital data (it is to the exact same parameters as
the rest of the MPEG, it wouldn't work otherwise).

As we are talking about a source that is Analog VHS tape, it is
most likely that the material has already been professionally edited
and that the editing the OP would be referring to is just the removal
of commercial breaks.

Luck;
Ken

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

Hi. Thanks for the responses. My major concern is to take my old
camcorder VHS tapes and put them on DVDs.
Some of the tapes are analog and some are digital. If this is the
case, is it better to use a capture card or just dub
them to a DVD first?

Thanks again.

 

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Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

<bdinic@mchsi.com> wrote in message
news:1108006400.609779.107510@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> Hi. Thanks for the responses. My major concern is to take my old
> camcorder VHS tapes and put them on DVDs.
> Some of the tapes are analog and some are digital. If this is the
> case, is it better to use a capture card or just dub
> them to a DVD first?
>
> Thanks again.
>

Well if you have Digital VHS and a Digital output ?

Ok, then you would want to be able to do the type of Editing
that would require a re-encoding if you were working with
a highly compressed format like MPEG. So you should
capture to a low compression format, one of the DV formats
in an AVI wrapper probably. Be prepared to spend a lot of
time working this way.

There are a lot of different approaches and system requirements
associated with them. You may even want to find the software
that you will use to edit your camcorder video, and then get the
hardware that works best with your software.

Luck;
Ken

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

Thanks for the great answers. I really like this board. A ton of
useful information and willing participants!