Very cool info there.
Thanks.
Also thanks for the nice comment.
I bought a slew of these years ago in Manhattan, before Guiliani came into office & shut down many of the shops.
The Indian shops sold dupes, but what i would do is to go in with my own HQ chrome blanks & tell them to transfer to my tape, instead of the cheapo tapes they sold. I would then pay them the same amount for the tape.
I would just come back later in the week & they would be done.
As for the equipment I use a Dazzle DVC & run S-video from my Panasonic VCR.
http://www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSi...+Video+Archiving/Dazzle+DVD+Recorder+Plus.htm
I then use Roxio Creator 10 capture software.
I find this to be the easiest, & most user friendly.
It allows me to encode right to Mpeg 2 at 8000kbps
with a 720x480 res.
Mpeg 2 as opposed to uncompressed AVI.
For 1 it takes less space. Also mpeg 2 softens the video right from the start.
From there I go to Avidemux to encode to XVID.
There are all the essentials in the program i need to crop,
clean noise & do any other post-processing like color editing etc.
If it is really bad I will use an avisynth script to clean.
I will encode to XVID using 2-3 at the constant quantize setting.
Then the next step to take it to MKV is to run it through a program called Handbrake.
Here I can really shrink the file down to file-share size,
& maintain quality with the h.264 codec.
There I set both detelecine & decomb to default.
This way Handbrake picks which of the 2 is needed.
What happens when transferring analog vido to a digital stream is that because the video is interlaced, or telecined.
this is what you will see.
Look here at buckwheat's hands
very unattractive lines.
Even though this is great quality. about 2400kbps & crystal clean. The lines take away from the video.
Motion causes the problem so you can see it quite a bit
as you will watch a video transfer from analog
Here is the same still after being Detelecined/Deinterlaced
Also trimmed substantially in size to 1,132 Kbps with H.264
If you would like to get into doing it yourself, it is a fun hobby. You need patience & a beast of a processor. Quad-core is recommended & 4GB of ram.
The Athlon line beats Intel in this dept.
This site is the bible for all that is video.
http://www.videohelp.com/
you will find answers for most everything, from hardware, to software, to filters, to codecs.
You can always shoot a pm my way if you have any questions.