Capturing old home movies

eddyc

eddyc

eddyc

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13 Nov 2009
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I am wanting to digitise my old VHS home movies, primarily to stop them degrading any further and to get them backed up online.

I have an old PCI TV card with an s-video input (quite like this one: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-022-CP) which should cover the hardware requirements.

I was wondering if you guys have any recommendations for a piece of free software I could use to capture and encode the video/audio?

Any help would be great. :)
 
VirtualDub will do Avi Capture and is what I use. Plenty of flexibility on codecs, capture card config etc. I apply a de-interlace filter at capture also which cleans up the image nicely.

For editing/effects/otherwise it starts to get a bit more tricky. I use Sony Vegas personally but it's not free. Windows Movie maker might be an option but I am not well versed with opensource/Free alternatives. Hopefully someone else can recommend something there!
 
VirtualDub by a mile.
It is a very powerful tool and can be a bit tricky to use though.

AVS also isn't bad and much easier to use (nowhere near as powerful as VDub though).
 
Yeah software is a bit trickier for decent editing.

Quite a lot of places do free trials though for a month - Avid and Corel both do 30 day trials on there products (the Avid solution is a mile better).

If you're simply going to archive the VHS's rather than edit them up, then VDub alone will be fine. Just use a decent codec (and non-GOP if you intend to edit in the future).
 
Great. Thanks for the responses guys. :)

Certainly initially my plan is just to capture them and not bother with too much editing or effects. I guess if I can save them to a usable format, .avi or whatever, then I can come back and edit them later.

So it sounds like VirtualDub is the way to go. I must admit I am a bit intimidated by it. I'll have a dig through to documentation.

Cheers
 
It's not a eye candy GUI but it's not CLI hard either.

From the main VirtualDub window File > Capture AVI.. is where you want to start :) THis load the capture interface.

Under Audio and Video menus you have Capture settings, Compression options, filters etc. All you need be concerned about is compression at this time but have a fiddle with other stuff (Like I mentioned, I use a De-interlace filter to remove interlace lines from my material)

Device menu will contain capture card specific options (Source etc)

Under Audio menu you can select 'Enable audio playback' for testing (Plays captured audio back through soundcard) but deselect this for capturing. You will still record audio, just without the monitor. It messes stuff up. You may need to mess about with your audio compression format. I capture uncompressed RAW PCM at 16Bits/sample 32,000Hz - anything more messed up my audio.

Under Video I would suggest using Overlay for display if you need to see what's being captured. I disable it as I can monitor video on my Video8 camcorder display.

Under Video and 'Set custom format' you can select the frame size and data format. Match it to your source material. I use YUY2 as RGB gives me artifacting. Pick what your capture card supports and gives the best results.

File > Set Capture File (Where file will stream to)

Capture Menu > Capture Video to start capture > Push Play on VCR/Device playing tapes > Capture Menu > Stop Capture when finished

When I encode in x264 I get horrible audio sync problems. I therefore capture in Xvid mpeg4 which gives me a decent filesize, without sync issues.
 
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