VHS to DVD/Mp4

[fleshman03]

Well I think the title says it all. How do I go about converting those old family movies to a DVD?

I eventually plan on ripping those DVDs to create Mp4s so I'll end up having two copies. The order I do this doesn't really matter.

It'll end up being somewhere in the ball park of 100 VHS tapes. I'll only really need about 10 of those in Mp4's.

Budget:
Cheap, if I can manage it. I'd prefer not to spend over $100 on this project. I know it'll end up costing me 10's of hours of actual work, if not more. Not thrilled with that, but such is life.

Hardware:
MacBook Pro (Dual Layer DVD burner. I'm only going to use a single layer/dvd.)
Old Family VHS. Has composite cable.

If there is a legit reason to buy a tv tuner in the guise of this project, I'd be happy. The EyeTv 250 plus is out of my range, considering it costs $180. Anything similar to that?

I'm not against going to BootCamp route and buying a $50 cable to connect an old VCR to my MBP either.

Also, is this better to post in the Digital Video forum?

 

[i.shaun]

Well I think the title says it all. How do I go about converting those old family movies to a DVD?

I eventually plan on ripping those DVDs to create Mp4s so I'll end up having two copies. The order I do this doesn't really matter.

It'll end up being somewhere in the ball park of 100 VHS tapes. I'll only really need about 10 of those in Mp4's.

Budget:
Cheap, if I can manage it. I'd prefer not to spend over $100 on this project. I know it'll end up costing me 10's of hours of actual work, if not more. Not thrilled with that, but such is life.

Hardware:
MacBook Pro (Dual Layer DVD burner. I'm only going to use a single layer/dvd.)
Old Family VHS. Has composite cable.

If there is a legit reason to buy a tv tuner in the guise of this project, I'd be happy. The EyeTv 250 plus is out of my range, considering it costs $180. Anything similar to that?

I'm not against going to BootCamp route and buying a $50 cable to connect an old VCR to my MBP either.

Also, is this better to post in the Digital Video forum?

I used EyeTV Hybrid to hook up my VCR and preserve an old family video on DVD.

I recorded them, converted them to mp4 I believe with EyeTV. Opened Quicktime Pro to trim them properly and save each part as a separate file, then burned them in iDVD. I saved the video files on a data DVD aswell.


I usually burn things in Visual Hub, but that does not have menu's, it just makes a video into a DVD that plays right away upon loading the DVD.

edit: if you have access to a windows machine, other TV tuners may be cheaper.

 

[rjphoto]

Well, I'm afraid you're in for a lot more work than you think.

Capture time is going to be 1 hour for each hour of video... 100 VHS @ 2 hours each. WOW.

Then you may want to do some editing to get the ugly sections out (Uncle Jim left the tape running while the camera was pointed at the floor... Yep, that was in one I edited. The funny one was editing out the Ex-Uncle that no one liked anyway.)

Then you have the encoding time for making the DVD(s). Depending on the speed of you computer you may get it down to a little under 45 min per hour of tape. (Maybe faster. I was using an Intel iMac 2.0 and it would take about that.)

I've never used an EyeTV device but I hear good things.

I've always used a camcorder with analog pass through.

 

[fleshman03]

Well, I'm afraid you're in for a lot more work than you think.

Capture time is going to be 1 hour for each hour of video... 100 VHS @ 2 hours each. WOW.

Then you may want to do some editing to get the ugly sections out (Uncle Jim left the tape running while the camera was pointed at the floor... Yep, that was in one I edited. The funny one was editing out the Ex-Uncle that no one liked anyway.)

Then you have the encoding time for making the DVD(s). Depending on the speed of you computer you may get it down to a little under 45 min per hour of tape. (Maybe faster. I was using an Intel iMac 2.0 and it would take about that.)

I've never used an EyeTV device but I hear good things.

I've always used a camcorder with analog pass through.

Great so 100's of hours. All so I get copies the GF's family videos and mail them to her parents. I have a 2.5ghz C2D so I shouldn't have a problem with accelerating the video. (At least I hope.)

How do I go about hooking the EyeTV hybrid to the MBP? Through the simple cable wire? Im guessing acceleration is out of the picture with that method.

 

[rjphoto]

acceleration of any analog video source to copy it is pretty much out of the question as far as I know and I've been in the video biz for 20+ years. If there is I've been doing it the hard way all this time...

SOmeone who knows the family should be sifting through the footage and just pick out the highlights edited together for a single DVD, in my opinion.

That's what I would make them do if they were going to hire me out to do it. I don't think they would want to pay my hourly rate to encode 100+ hours of footage and make DVD's of the whole lot.

Then again, I could use the work...

 

[sickmacdoc]

You should probably check out a relatively new product from Pinnacle called "Pinnacle Video Capture for Mac" that can be seen here. It will handle all types of analog sources including VCR's and hooks to a USB port on your Mac. At $99.99 it fits your budget fine. It does have a hardware encoder on it so will take most of the grunt work of video conversion off your Mac's processor which makes the price seem pretty reasonable.

Check out the link above and use Google to read some reviews of it and you might like what you see.

Like rjphoto I have always used a camcorder with a pass through for doing these conversions, but this has some promise for those who do not have that type of camcorder available to them.

 

[fleshman03]

acceleration of any analog video source to copy it is pretty much out of the question as far as I know and I've been in the video biz for 20+ years. If there is I've been doing it the hard way all this time...

SOmeone who knows the family should be sifting through the footage and just pick out the highlights edited together for a single DVD, in my opinion.

That's what I would make them do if they were going to hire me out to do it. I don't think they would want to pay my hourly rate to encode 100+ hours of footage and make DVD's of the whole lot.

Then again, I could use the work...

I mentioned doing that to her mother. She said that he would want them all. He has my GF's gymnastics stuff from when she was 3-11. Every. Single. One.

I didn't really think acceleration would be possible, but you never know.

You should probably check out a relatively new product from Pinnacle called "Pinnacle Video Capture for Mac" that can be seen here. It will handle all types of analog sources including VCR's and hooks to a USB port on your Mac. At $99.99 it fits your budget fine. It does have a hardware encoder on it so will take most of the grunt work of video conversion off your Mac's processor which makes the price seem pretty reasonable.

Check out the link above and use Google to read some reviews of it and you might like what you see.

Like rjphoto I have always used a camcorder with a pass through for doing these conversions, but this has some promise for those who do not have that type of camcorder available to them.

I know the EyeTV hybrid doesn't have a hardware encoder. Part of the reason why I bought this particular MBP was because of the processor. Would the 2.5Ghz C2D be alright? It has a 6mb cache and I know I see a difference a huge difference between this processor and the one in my old Dell. (3.4Ghz HT)

How much space should I have on my HD since it'll be getting the raw feed. I'm assuming the EyeTV doesn't actually encode the files into mp4's within the program. (Or does it?)

Last question for now. Has anyone tired hooking the EyeTV to a Windoze box? I'd like for the device to have a second life by being hooked up to my old 1.6 Ghz AMD dual core Laptop and become a DVR.

Sorry about the million questions. I'm really new to this type of project. I've done some rips and Mp4 encodes of DVDs before, but going from VHS -> Mp4 -> DVD is new to me.

 

[rjphoto]

I don't know about encoding straight to mp4 as far as HD size, but when I record DV format for editing it takes about 12gigs per hour. (I know the TV shows I've downloaded run about 400-500Mb per 40 minute show.)

Again, I don't know what the EyeTV can do.

As far as the Horse Power of your compute you should be fine.

I'm sure LeathalWolfe could answer all of your questions off the top of his head. See if you can find his profile and send him a PM.

 

[i.shaun]

Eye TV doesn't encode right away, you may want a few gigs depending on how many hours at a time you want to record.

It basically does an uncompressed Recording that only it can read (because it's basically a PVR).

You can open these videos in EyeTV and move through them easily, even go back and re-watch a part while it's recording.


When you want to save the video, you can export it, and this could take some time to encode and compress the file to quicktime or iTunes format.


Then there's editing, and encoding to DVD, and burning. for 100+ tapes, I'd say you have your work cut out for you.