Best capture formats?

[Dennis R. Cohen]

On 10/7/03 at 10:15 PM, "Dr. M. Burek" <mrwitch at tampabay.rr.com>
transmitted the following electronic message:

>
>I have just gotten a Formac TVPro II PCI card for my Mac, to capture
>from VHS tapes. I plan on making VCD's or SVCD's now, but I'll be
>buring DVD-R's later, once I can get a faster Mac w/ a DVD burner.
>
>I'm using Formac's drivers and applications (for the moment) in both
>OS 9 and OS X jaguar. Works great, too. What I would like to know is,
>what is the best capture format to do this?
>
>I'm planning on using either iMovie and/or Toast 6 to edit and burn
>the final disc with. I need to keep the capture file fairly small
>(about 4-5 GB for an hour of video), and my Mac isn't very fast. It's
>a 7300 upgraded with a Sonnet G3/400 with 1 MB of L2 cache. I can
>capture in either OS 9.1 or OS X to maximize my available speed
>resources, but will be doing all manipulation of the data under OS X.
>
>Rendering times and all of that isn't a problem, I can leave the Mac
>on overnight if necessary to do that. I am primarily concerned with
>skipping frames & best quality I can get with what I have.
>
>Thanks for any help
>
>

If you're going to use iMovie in the process, you're best served with DV
Stream, but that exceeds the space limitation you gave. You can use
other formats, but iMovie is going to convert them to DV Stream anyway,
so you'll have that space and the original capture's space to deal with.

Going to VCD, you're actually committing overkill :) El Gato's EyeTV
unit lets you feed directly from a VCR and it is a hardware MPEG-1
encoder, making VCD-compatible files, all ready to burn in Toast. In
fact, I do this sort of thing a lot to preserve old Beta and VHS tape
content.

Going to SVCD, you should look for the best quality you can get --
Motion JPEG is what many references recommend and I've found it to be
more than adequate. I generally use it when converting items in my old
LaserDisc collection -- yeah, I've jumped into almost every video trend
over the past 25-30 years.

The main point is that if you capture in a compressed format, then
recompress into the same or different format, you're going to lose
quality. If you have FireWire available (PCI card?) or a large extra
SCSI drive, I would suggest that you employ a dedicated disk to
capturing in DV Stream (about 12GB/hour). VHS is already pretty poor
quality and giving up detail even before the encoding discards data is
just going to make things worse.

As to OS 9 vs OS X, you'll find a lot more tools available for X, as
well as a more stable platform for dealing with the capture and
encoding.

Check out <www.dvdrhelp.com> for many related topics on capturing and
encoding. It's somewhat biased toward Windows, but much of the
information is platform-agnostic and there are Mac sections as well.

I hope this helps,

-- 
Dennis Cohen
Mac Digital Photography
iLife Bible
Mac OS X Bible (and other titles)