Conversion / Import Suggestions

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
8,576
Location
Hereford
Hi guys

After some advice... A work colleague has hours/days/weeks worth of recordings on physical media, mostly in the form of VHS or DV tapes. He's previously paid a company to convert some of them to digital so he can try to author/edit the footage together, it'll soon turn into quite an expensive method. They seem to have converted to DVD so he doesn't have the digital file unless we rip/recapture it.

I believe most of the footage is probably at a fairly low quality and from the 70's and 80's of his kids/family along with other parts recorded from TV to VHS.

He's wanting to convert to MP4 or MPEG (my suggestions) so he can use with editing software (currently playing with Windows Movie Maker and seems happy with it, but open to suggestions). He wants to create logical timeline-based creations and author to DVD for other family members.

Most of the current solutions I can think of require playing back these complete VHS' in real time and capturing using something like this. File sizes are obviously going to be pretty huge and it's going to take him months recording things in real time. Is there a standalone device which would capture S-video (+audio) onto some internal storage which would convert to a preset format? He could then just copy this (USB attached? MicroSD cards?) to PC for splitting/creation at his leisure. Playback still in real time from VHS player/DV camera.

He's got a powerful quad core i7 with 16GB ram and probably a 2TB mechanical HDD so has plenty of processing power. :cool:

Don't think he's too worried about the time/storage involved in the current idea, but also not adverse to purchasing equipment/storage to make it easier. The memories on his footage are obviously the important part, so whatever is the best way to digitise them for 'playing around' with. Don't want to think I missed anything obvious but I'm not really experienced in most of this... I know Pinnacle used to do good capture cards and software, are they still the brand to look for?

Thanks :)
 
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