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Brian Rudick · Forensic Video User

Just looking for opinions here. We still record suspect interviews on VHS. From time to time we need to convert them to digital for trial or for sheer storage space issues. Here is my questions. Using VT, which Windows based CODEC would allow the videos to be played on the broadest number of computers. There are so many Windows based choices in the drop down menu and the manual is no help at all. Mind you I'm not concerned with the quality (doesn't need to be HQ) I'm just looking for the best format so that the videos of the interview can be easily viewed. I've recorded them at Uncompressed BGR24 in the past and then used DVD software to make a DVD but for some of the interviews (some were several hours long) that took a HUGE amount of space and more than 24 hrs to make the DVD. Not very practical.

joearch · Administrator

Hi Brian,

If I understand the problem, you are capturing NTSC analog video to uncompressed BGR24 in VT. An hour of video is being captured to a 60GB AVI file, and the process of authoring the DVD is (understandably) taking forever.

I'm assuming that you're satisfied with the versatility of DVD/MPEG-2 as your archive format. You'll occasionally run across a PC or Mac without an installed MPEG-2 decoder, but you generally can't beat the DVD format for universal acceptance, especially with the consumer electronics angle.

So the question is how to create the DVDs more efficiently. Since video quality is not critical here, you probably want to encode the initial capture in VT using a realtime-capable codec, and then let your authoring software re-encode the (much smaller) video file to MPEG-2. The VT manual labels several of the video codec options as not suitable for realtime encoding. You'll have to experiment with the others to see what works best.

Throw a VHS movie in the VCR to experiment with, and just try some ten minute captures to different encoded formats. If the encoding can keep up without dropping frames, try authoring a DVD from the result.

From what I can tell, though, VT just isn't set up to conveniently perform VHS-to-DVD transfers. Ideally, it would realtime encode the analog video signal to MPEG-2 and then let you create a DVD without a re-encoding step. Unfortunately, I don't think VT can encode MPEG-2 realtime. So even if the DVD authoring step goes a lot faster with your compressed capture, it is still a pretty painful process.

You may want to try a simpler option with realtime MPEG-2 hardware encoding like the ADS Tech DVD Xpress DX2 or Sony VRD-MC6, or even a DVD-based camcorder.

-- Joe