New and over my head!

ajg617 · Post by **ajg617** » Sat Oct 03, 2009 1:33 am

Hello all. My name is John and I live in soon-to-be chilly New Hampshire. After 30 years in telecommunications, IT and Information Assurance I decided to try and archive my family VHS and 8mm tapes in my spare time, before they fade away. We purchased our first video camera around 1982 and five children later, have amassed quite a number of tapes (OK mostly of the back of my wife pushing the stroller with a few air shows in between).

So, I purchased X2 pro and very quickly discovered that I not only am terrible at taking videos, but also at converting them to digital. It is not a trivial task. I used to think I was technically competent. Hopefully, this forum will start my road to recovery. Any pointers to specific getting started links for simple analog to digital video conversion would be more than welcome. I'm just getting underway making Steve's profile changes - and that is just to get the PC performance optimal - never mind the in's and out's of recording video!

I would note that the Corel website is pretty loose in the minimum system requirements CPU category compared to the book that comes with the product. The website simply states Intel P4 or equivalent - that I have. The book however, requests a 3.0GB P4 - that I do not have (2.4GB). Comments welcome on this one as well.

Best regards to all.

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Sat Oct 03, 2009 4:30 am

For starters, please read From VHS to DVD.

skier-hughes · Post by **skier-hughes** » Sat Oct 03, 2009 8:19 am

If you want ease of use, great quality - or read minimal loss of quality in conversion, a file that will import into VS and edit easily and without any further loss of quality, then I'd recommend one of the canopus advc range of analogue to video convertors from Tomson Grass Valley
There is a great range, the more you pay the greater the facilities, but each use the same method of conversion so you won't get better quality from the top of the range compared to the bottom, just more inpts/outputs.
http://desktop.grassvalley.com/products ... ersion.php

Not cheap, but these are your memories

Your pc will be fine with the normal dv.avi files this product produces, you'll suffer when using hd files or maybe see a slow down if you are trying to edit less std files such as mpeg/divx etc.