[MacDV] VCR to DVD Strategy

[Nick Scalise]

> From: Dennis Fazio <dfz at mac.com>
> Date: 2006/04/10 Mon PM 12:32:14 EDT
> To: macdv at listserver.themacintoshguy.com
> Subject: [MacDV] VCR to DVD Strategy
> 
> I am in the process of converting about a dozen home video VCR tapes  
> to DVD. I have a Canopus ADVC-100 I got a while ago and it works just  
> great feeding into iMovie on my PowerBook.
> 
> I could use some advice on how to best manage the quantity. I have  
> about 100GB of firewire disk available which will hold 3 or 4 2-hour  
> tapes at about 24-25GB apiece. I was thinking I would just do a  
> direct copy/convert one tape at a time to DVD, but then I thought I  
> might want to edit them down a bit later on before a final version.  
> That would require writing to DVD to free up space and later ripping  
> them back in to edit.
> 
> My concern is the loss of quality from the extra compression step.  
> Since the original is 200 or so line resolution from a VCR camera, is  
> there a way to do a temporary write, re-rip, edit and rewrite process  
> without really losing any quality that I or others without expert  
> eyes would really notice from this kind of source material? If I  
> wrote, say, 1/2 hour or 1 hour of material per DVD to reduce  
> compression, would that help?
> 
> How have others handled this kind of thing in the past? Just process  
> one at a time to final edited version? My concern is that if I throw  
> in the editing time for each tape before reading in the next, it may  
> take me a very long time to get them all transferred and I'd like to  
> get them all into digital form quickly before the tapes deteriorate  
> too much further in quality.

After capturing to your hard drive you could export them back out to DV tape, if you have a DV camcorder. That would leave the quality as high as possible for the next process.

You could also just buy another firewire drive. If you buy a bare drive and an empty enclosure and build it yourself, you can get it pretty cheap.

--
Nick Scalise
nickscalise at cox.net