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Which Transcoding Tools Produce The Best Picture Quality.

Discussion in 'Copy DVD to DVDR' started by Sophocles, Jun 5, 2004.

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  1. Sophocles

    Sophocles Senior member

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    Hmm! Yes I did forget that little factor didn't I. A wife and kids, but my youngest is now 17 and almost 18, and the boat is in storage.
     
    Sophocles, Sep 12, 2004
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  2. Doc409

    Doc409 Active member

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    Sophocles...Do I remember you saying you're off til Tuesday?
     
    Doc409, Sep 13, 2004
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  3. Sophocles

    Sophocles Senior member

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    The Hurricane has taken a turn away from us so we will be going back to work on Tuesday. I do however get Thursday off because of Rosh Hashanah.
     
    Sophocles, Sep 13, 2004
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  4. Doc409

    Doc409 Active member

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    Well, that's good news about Ivan. So it'll be a short week, so to speak?

    I'm onto a new project and I'm wondering how much of this DVD backup knowlegde will be useful. I want to convert about 60 hours of home video VHS-C tapes to DVD. I just got the Canopus ADVC100, which locks the A/V, and converts to DV AVI. I'd like to get 2 hours of quality home video on a DVD-5. Any thoughts? (I should probably take this over to the video forum...any takers right now?)

     
    Doc409, Sep 13, 2004
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  5. Sophocles

    Sophocles Senior member

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    Canopus should do all the work for you right to the burn. The file that you copy to your hard disk will be an avi file and the decompression to mpeg2 will allow only about an hour and 10 minutes of play time on a type 5. For me that was enough on one DVD, I focussed more on chapters.
    _X_X_X_X_X_[small][​IMG]

    Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Sherlock Holmes (by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930)[/small]
     
    Last edited: Sep 13, 2004
    Sophocles, Sep 13, 2004
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  6. Doc409

    Doc409 Active member

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    A couple of quick ones. About how large is a 1 hour DV AVI file, and what prog did you edit with for your chapters? Is this where you would suggest Ulead?
     
    Doc409, Sep 13, 2004
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  7. vurbal

    vurbal Administrator Staff Member

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    You should definitely hold off judgement regarding the amount you can fit on a DVD until you see what kind of quality the file is, and whether you need (or want) to do anything to clean it up. As a general rule, home videos require a fairly high bitrate than commercial sources so as Sophocles mentioned, 2 hours at high quality is probably unrealistic. On the other hand, it's a perfect oppurtunity to get experience encoding with CCE.
     
    vurbal, Sep 13, 2004
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  8. Sophocles

    Sophocles Senior member

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    I used Ulead for both capturing and editing. I can't remember the actual file size of the AVi but an avi is more compressed than mpeg2 and the decompression is not an exact science. You could probably use a transcoder on it when you're finished to compress even more but I chose to leave it alone for quality.
     
    Sophocles, Sep 13, 2004
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  9. Sophocles

    Sophocles Senior member

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    Vurbal

    I used a Sony Hi8 Cam and I have to say that the quality was really quite good, I didn't see any noticeable transfer loss. I was more than happy with the little more than an hour I got and an hour is a lot of watching when they're home movies.
     
    Sophocles, Sep 13, 2004
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  10. Doc409

    Doc409 Active member

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    Well, quality is a strong concern, and thanks for focusing on that part. I think the 60 hours of home video might edit down to 6 hours, so whether it's 3 or 6 DVD's really isn't important.

     
    Doc409, Sep 13, 2004
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  11. vurbal

    vurbal Administrator Staff Member

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    @Sophocles:
    A DV encoded AVI shouldn't be smaller than the same footage on DVD. An hour of DV encoded video (plus the associated WAV audio) is over 10GB because it doesn't use interframe compression like MPEG does.

    I agree that you can get high quality captures. In fact if the original is good, the captured video should be as well, especially using the ADVC-300 to convert to DV.
     
    vurbal, Sep 13, 2004
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  12. Doc409

    Doc409 Active member

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    I also wanted to confirm that it is best to edit the avi's, rather than edit after they are converted to mpeg's?

    For convenience, I'd like to get as much of the 60 hours on a couple of large hard drives, and edit as a total package. Is 10 to 12 GB per hour a good rule of thumb?


     
    Doc409, Sep 13, 2004
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  13. Sophocles

    Sophocles Senior member

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    I really don't think I'd want more than 70 minutes of home video on a DVD. I didn't have to do a lot of editing because my Hi8 has flying erase heads which allows for editing as you go so there wasn't too much usless stuff. I ended with a little over thirty DVD's of home movies and they're family treasures. Vurbal I never actually compared the file size so I was just assuming and I never used CCE because I did this over a year ago.
    _X_X_X_X_X_[small][​IMG]

    Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Sherlock Holmes (by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930)[/small]
     
    Last edited: Sep 13, 2004
    Sophocles, Sep 13, 2004
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  14. Sophocles

    Sophocles Senior member

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    Vurbal

    On another note, have you researched Digital cams of any kind, I'm looking to buy one to replace my aging hi8. If these hurricanes would leave me alone I'd be play with Adobe Premier Pro 1.5 and CCE but UPS keeps rescheduling the delivery.
     
    Sophocles, Sep 13, 2004
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  15. vurbal

    vurbal Administrator Staff Member

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    Yeah, I didn't figure you'd had a chance to use CCE for it. I just didn't want Doc getting worried about his captures being bigger than they should be.

    I have done some research on DV camcorders. In fact I bought one from somebody my wife works with. It was a real eye opener discovering how hard it was to find good technical comparisons between them. I highly recommend looking through the FAQ on Doom9's DV forum and reading through all the links to get started. They explain a lot of things far better than I could. That will most likely raise even more questions, but it's a good place to start. As far as differences between brands go, it largely depends on how much money you're going to spend. My camcorder is a fairly low end model, and I picked a Canon because it came with a better lense than other brands supply for a comparable price. On the other hand, it doesn't handle low light recording well, which some other brands (Panasonic and Sony IIRC) handle well with similarly priced models. If you spend enough money, the differences from one brand to another become much less significant.
     
    vurbal, Sep 13, 2004
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  16. Sophocles

    Sophocles Senior member

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    Sophocles, Sep 13, 2004
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  17. vurbal

    vurbal Administrator Staff Member

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    That definitely looks nice! I'll be very jealous if you get one.
     
    vurbal, Sep 13, 2004
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  18. Doc409

    Doc409 Active member

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    That camcorder does sound nice, and I will also be jealous. I like the idea of the "film look" concept. I have been wondering for a long time why each (film and video) had a different look to them.

    Ummm, with a digital recording studio, Premiere 1.5/CCE and this camera, one might think you are planning on proiducing professional music videos?

    _X_X_X_X_X_[small].
    .
    [​IMG]

    I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. (Pablo Picasso)[/small]
     
    Last edited: Sep 13, 2004
    Doc409, Sep 13, 2004
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  19. Sophocles

    Sophocles Senior member

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    Hmm!

    It's amazing how one can put things together to form a conclusions. You're not to far off Doc, it just seems to be a waste to know stuff and not benefit from it somehow.
    _X_X_X_X_X_[small][​IMG]

    Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Sherlock Holmes (by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930)[/small]
     
    Last edited: Sep 13, 2004
    Sophocles, Sep 13, 2004
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  20. jdobbs

    jdobbs Regular member

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    I do this all the time. I personally capture to segmented AVI files (so you get 100% of the original quality) and use CCE for video and SoftEncode for audio. How much you can fit depends upon what level of quality you want and how much action/camera movement you start with. Good videography makes for less bandwith.

    You can do a lot better with multiple pass encoding (Canopus included) -- that's why I use segmented AVIs, the on-the-fly MPEG encoders will all leave you wanting for quality.

    But capturing to segmented AVI has its own drawbacks. DV uses about 3.6 Megabytes per second... that means less than 10 minutes takes 2 Gigabytes... and an hour? Well you get the point --> get a big hard drive!

     
    Last edited: Sep 13, 2004
    jdobbs, Sep 13, 2004
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