VHS to DVD essentials

[TowerGuy]

Been a while since I have been on the board, but, once again need some advice. I have a lot of VHS tapes that I would like to transfer to DVD's to give to my kids. The more I read on the internet, the more confused I get. What I have been considering, is the purchase of an ADS Express USB2.0 Capture device from Tigerdirect -

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=580965&Sku=A03-7042

and if necessary, Pinnacle Studio 9 software from Newegg -

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16832126020

I would like to transfer the VHS tapes to the PC, do some moderate editing (deleting redundant scenes, etc.) , and burn to a DVD.

Has anyone had any experience with using the ADS Express and is the software any good??

My basic system consists of:

MSI KT4 Ultra motherboard, 512MB ram
AMD Athlon XP2100 processor @1.73gh
Maxtor 120gb hard drive (primary)
Seagate 120mb hard drive (secondary)
Sapphire Radeon 9000 Atlantis pro video card
LG DVD/RW drive
Lite-on CD/RW drive
Lite-on DVD ROM

Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks, from the Black Hills of Wyoming.

[pentachris]

Your best bet will be to get them onto your computer in .avi format instead of compressed as mpeg. Mpeg is not very easily edited because not every frame is recorded individually in its entirety - part of the compression is to record a frame and then just record changes to the frame.

The most common way to get .avi video to your computer is via firewire. There aren't many USB 2 devices that are capable of doing this yet. USB 1 doesn't have the bandwidth to do it.

Canopus makes a good line of analog-digital converters that will hook up to your VCR and send .avi video to your computer via firewire. And firewire cards are cheap on newegg.

Alternatively, if you have a mini-DV camcorder, it may have analog-digital pass through as a feature. My Sony HC-30 does.

I've heard a lot of people who have experienced stability problems with Pinnacle's software. After researching around, I decided to go with Sony Vegas Movie Studio. It's got features comparable to the Pinnacle product, it's known to be more stable, and it's about the same price ($100).

[ErnieK]

You might be better going fo rthe Pinnacle package. This would give you a blue box to connect your computer and TV/Video together via cables and a PCI card with connector for box as well as firewire port.

Then after setting the TV/Video up and Installing Pinnacle onto computer you just play the video and click record on on the computer inteface. Pinncale support is none to good but a very good forum. This is th eroute I took and I have found it easy to work with and I do not learn things easily. Allows you to input and out back Fron/to tape as well as DVD/CD. Just make certain you have large HDD and plenty of RAM installed.

Forums:
http://webboard.pinnaclesys.com/read_forums.asp?WebboardID=14&SectionID=85&lng=1

[John0904]

System I currently have...

Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe (http://www.tv-cards.com/pctvdeluxe.php)
Able to record from VHS, Camcorder and other devices.
MPEG1/2 to VCD, SVCD, DVD, and DVD+DL.
Software includes burning option, but no editing.

Other software I have to expand my options are:
DVD-lab PRO, MPEG-VCR, Nero Burning ROM, DVD Decrypter.

[alex666]

I'm real interested in this thread, as I'm in the identical situation as Towerguy with the same goals, convert my home vhs tapes to digital, with some minor editing, and then copy to dvds. I have another thread going re. trying to get moviemaker2 to work right, but thus far I've had no responses after two days:

http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=37810

In any case, I have the ati usb wonder 2.0. I can copy my vhs tapes to the computer using it just fine, and they play just fine in Windows media player and others like Nero. However, when I try to edit using moviemaker2, it has been a total bust (see my thread, nothing has changed). I've tried to use Nero 6.6 for editing, but the sound and video get out of sync. Someone suggested using windows media encoder to convert my files (they are in mpg format) to wmv, but at the outset of the second pass, I get errors due to my audio codecs, whatever that means. In short, this has been a very frustrating experience so far.

I downloaded Sony's Vegas today, but left it at work. I thought I'd give that a try, nice that you can download it and try it out. Maybe I'll try to convert my files to avi if that is possible. This is a whole new world, learning about all the various codecs and such. I'm fairly computer savvy, and it just seems like this has been way too hard of a process, if you know what I mean. I cannot recall when I've had such difficulty performing what is seemingly a straightforward process. so now that I'm done whining, I too am open to any suggestions. Thanks.

marty

[ErnieK]

when you are experiencing Audio/Vid sync probs try either slowing down your burn speed or making an image file to the computer and then burn the image (using Nero) to disk.

(Try using a CDrw / DVDrw disk to avoid waste (If your DVD player will play them). Play it on the computer first, skiping through, making a note of any points that are out of sync then try it on your DVD player and check the same frames, as sometimes I have had out of sync on the computer but not when played on on player attached to TV)

Have a look here. A wee (big) bit convoluted and over my head but second/third post down might help.
http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=802552

[John0904]

If there are problems with codecs, this site may help.
http://www.free-codecs.com/

[alex666]

I probablay will need that codec site, because I downloaded Sony Vegas and it would not process my mpg file, says I need to buy the program first. I give up. I'll see if I can find a program to convert it to avi, I guess that's what I need to do.

I probably will end up going on-line and finding some good tutorials as well.

marty

[TowerGuy]

Thank you for your input. I was about ready to order a Canopus ADVC55 converter as Pentachris suggested as editing an .avi format makes more sense, when I ran across a PINNACLE Studio AV/DV Deluxe 9, still sealed in the box, for $90 at a garage sale. ErnieK seems to think a Pinnacle setup would answer my needs, and at half the original cost I did'nt think I could go wrong. My wife just asked me "Have you got everything figured out now?" All I could say was "Nope, just beginning!" We'll see what happens after I hook this puppy up. Thanks again.

[bassman]

Sounds like you might have all you need now, BUUTTTT, gotta put in my 2 cents in case you need it ;)

HERE (http://adaptec.com/worldwide/product/proddetail.html?sess=no&language=English+US&prodkey=AVC-2310&cat=%2fTechnology%2fVideo%2fVideo) is the rig I just got. Don't have a lot of experience with it yet but seems fairly simple to use and is a complete package designed to do exactly what you are talking about.

Good luck
Frank