[MacDV] VCR to DVD Strategy

[Aaron]

>From: Dennis Fazio <dfz at mac.com>
>Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 11:32:14 -0500
>
>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.

Do you mean that you want to ultimately archive them as standard (playable) DVD's, or to DVD discs as a storage medium? I'm presuming the former.

>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?

If you save them for now as standard DVD's or just as MPEG-2 files on DVD discs, and if you use a compression rate that will allow what you'll want on a single DVD later to fit on one, you can edit later with a program like MPEG Streamclip without having to go through an extra compression step. That's assuming that the editing you'll want to do will just be cutting and pasting. After editing, you'll have to re-create a playable DVD using either a free program like Sizzle or some other program that lets you create a DVD directly from an MPEG-2 file. (I'm not familiar enough with either iDVD or DVD Studio Pro to know if you can do that with them. Maybe somebody else will tell us!)

 - Aaron