Smart Work Process to capture loads of footage

[Scoota]

I have bucket loads of Home Video via VHS Video & for the last 6 months Digital footage (Sony DV) of home videos I want to burn to DVD.

My question is how is the best way of using my limited computer memory (app 50 GB of memory) to first capture hours of footage and then burn DVD's efficiently!

My limited understanding is that I should render once only - OK - but I would have easily 2 hours of footage to capture (to C Drive) to then reduce (render) to say 30 minutes of good stuff, how do I do this in a smart manner?

CAPTURE & SAVE TO SOMEWHERE, NOT JUST LEAVE ON C - DRIVE?
- Should I capture (and cut out the crap first) and I render (share) it to DV cassette first, just the basic stuff?
- Should I capture (and cut out the crap first) and I render (share) it to something smarter?

Please suggestions

[2Dogs]

Hi Scoota,

and welcome to the forum.

Sounds like a daunting task ahead of you. If your intention is to create watchable DVD's from your home video footage for distribution to friends and family, you shouldn't underestimate the time it will take to do the editing. Lots of hard decisions on what to use and what to leave out.

If, on the other hand, you are looking at this as a way of archiving your footage for later editing, it won't be quite such a great undertaking.

It would be helpful if you filled in the pc related info in your forum profile.

For the analogue footage, you will need a capture device. Perhaps you have a suitable all-in-one video card that you can use. The captured footage will be in mpeg-2 format. Depending on the quality of the source material, you might use a video bitrate of perhaps 4000 - 6000kbps, so one hour of footage would use around 3GB of file space.

If there is footage which you will definitely not wish to keep, you might capture from a couple of tapes and cut out the unwanted sections. The remaining footage might fit onto, say, two single layer DVD discs for archiving. After burning to the discs, you might then delete the captured footage from your hard drive.

Later on, if you decide to make a project incorporating some of the archived footage, you would need to copy the relevant files from the DVD's onto your hard drive.

You might use this archiving system if you have a good DVD burner and a ready supply of good quality blank media - but I would recommend you use an additional external hard drive instead. You can pick up a 320GB USB or Firewire external hard drive quite cheaply, onto which you could archive perhaps 80 - 100 hours of video captured from your analogue (VHS) source material. Larger drives are available - up to 1 TB, or 1000GB, although they are obviously more expensive.

The great advantage of using the external hard drive to store archive footage is that you need not worry about DVD burn quality, write errors, and so on. The hard drive will even take up less space than the 70+ DVD's you would otherwise use, and will be quicker to write to. When you need to use video files stored on the drive in a project, you won't need to copy them onto your pc hard drive. Should you decide to change your file naming system, it's easier to do with files stored on a hard drive.

With the more recent footage from the miniDV camcorder, you have the choice of capturing to DV avi - effectively copying the footage in it's original format - which will use about 13GB per hour of video. This is generally the preferred method, resulting in the best possible picture quality in the finished DVD. Alternatively, if you have a reasonably fast pc, such as a Pentium 4 2.8 or better, you could capture direct to mpeg-2. This might use around 4GB per hour of video. Although the mpeg-2 format is not designed for editing, the finished results should still be almost as good, and you will save on drive space and can also save time when rendering the final project if you are careful with your capture and project settings.

With the data on the miniDV tapes being stored in digital format rather than analogue, you might consider the original miniDV tape to be a suitable archive, able to safely store the footage without deterioration for several years.

So there are lots of decisions you need to take, which really will depend on your ultimate intentions. Perhaps you could try capturing from a single tape initially. You can then decide on a suitable file naming system, and what size "chunks" you might wish to break the video up into for archiving.

My principal recommendation would be to buy an external hard drive.

Good luck!

[Scoota]

Thanks for that information, I think I will buy some external hard drive.

Also updated some of my system info however I am not strong in IT and am not sure were to find the rest.

Thanks agian.

[2Dogs]

Thanks for that information, I think I will buy some external hard drive.

Good move. You could save a bit of money by fitting a second internal hard drive instead, but it's a little more complicated, and sometimes it's handy to be able to hook up an external drive to another pc - especially if, say, you also have a laptop and don't network your pc's.

Also updated some of my system info however I am not strong in IT and am not sure were to find the rest.

An easy way to find some more info is to right-click on "My Computer" and then click on "Properties" from the resulting drop-down menu. This should give you the CPU and the amount of installed RAM, in addition to the info you've already supplied.

I think the kind of people who are really good at IT are generally not the kind of people who shoot interesting videos!

[lespurgeon]

If your collection is at all like mine, it is "priceless" to you and family members.

A 500 GB external hard drive is under $150 now days, I would buy 2 of them. Capture all of you video to one of them. Make a copy of it to the second. Go put one of the drives in your safe deposit box (you will want to bring it out every few years to access it just to keep the drive lubricated). Do all of your work with the 2nd copy. If anything ever goes pear shaped, you allways have the vault copy.

I'm guessing we will all be transfering our current work onto some new format in the next 2-3 years, but it will be much easier to go from hard drive to new format than from tape.

I would suggest reading:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/dvdguides/capture/dv.htm

I probably would not use videostudio to transfer DV to hard disk (I work in HDV and us HDsplit) but rather one of the small pure transfer utilities. Use Videostudio to later edit your material - that is what it is very good at.

[Scoota]

Thanks for your suggestions.

You mentioned that you would not use videostudio to transfer DV to hard disk (that you work in HDV and us HDsplit) but rather one of the small pure transfer utilities - What does this mean, how is it done?

[Ken Berry]

You can of course use the Video Studio DV capture utility and it works perfectly well for most purposes. However, a number of us here use a small freeware program called WinDV, which specialises only in capturing DV (and exporting it back to camera). It will normally capture with no dropped frames at all and is highly reliable. You can find it at windv.mourek.cz

[Scoota]

Thanks Ken

I plan to copy the original DV footage, delete a certain amount (mistakes / boring bits ) then save it as a mastercopy. Should I save it:
- back to DV
- DVD
What I want is a safeguard to potential future hard drive failure as I cannot see myself buying 2 x 500 GB external hard drive as previously suggested?

Thanks in anticipation.

[lespurgeon]

I would keep a copy in the original DV format on a hard drive. Of course, you will probably also want to create DVDs, since they are much easier to watch /share.

[Ken Berry]

I personally save edited DV back to tape as it retains the quality and is relatively cheap to do, given the drop in price of DV tapes. However, after converting them to mpeg-2 and burning to DVD, I also preserve the converted mpeg-2s on an external hard drive. (Mind you, I have 8 of them, and loads of hard disk space otherwise - 3 TB on this computer alone!)

[Scoota]

Thanks everyone, very helpful

[Scoota]

Back agian........

When I buy the external drive any suggestions on particular brands or options e.g. USB or firewire connection. I will be purchasing 500 GB.

Also I am sure I saw some information (poss from Ken) on how to set up the external drive but cannot locate it. Any suggestions.

Thanks in anticipation.

[sjj1805]

I have 3 internal hard drives and 2 of these drives are further partitioned into 2 making a total of 5 hard drive letters.

You may be interested in my work flow:


For further information concerning my work flow please view{
From Camcorder to DVD with Video Studio