Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

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Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

It is a shame that VHS resolution is quite bad, equal to 352x288. However capturing at 720x576 still gives the best results. And the captured video can always then be re-render down to the native VHS 352x288 to save a lot of HDD space as it is 4 times smaller than full PAL, and in theory is actually the same as the original VHS recording.

I keep meaning to convert all my old VHS and SVHS tapes to DVD or digitise them to HD.

I bought a nice Panasonic DMREZ48VEBX DVD-R/VHS recorder combo unit at the start of this year with this in mind. Unlike those cheap horrible combined units, these Panasonic units are very nice quality. Normally they are selling in shops for close to £400, but I got one for £188 pre multi-region unlocked. And it produces very good VHS to DVD transfers, which saves the hassles of ripping to HD, transcoding to MP2, setting up the DVD structure and burning the DVD. It can also playback SVHS tapes perfectly, but can't record to them, which is still good for transferring to DVD as well. :)

The only issue with transferring them to DVD is that MPG2 doesn't store every frame of a video sequence, so you can't edit accurately, requiring re rendering to a different format first, and a natural lose in quality. However I don't have the HD space to store all the videos so it is going to have to be DVD.

I've got some Amiga VHS tapes I bought from PD libraries too. With things like all the Star Wars Amiga animations on. Looking forward to digging those out and watching them again. Plus some Amiga animation and DPaint tutorial videos. I'm hoping to get the time to do some nice quality captures of those and get them online.
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

@Harrison

:drool: :drool: :drool: :drool:

I would love to see some of those! Be sure to let us know when they are online.

I just picked up a CD-ROM from the other bay called the "Eric Schwartz Productions Archive". I'm going to have a lot of fun checking out all the good bits on there.

Heather
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

arnljot said:
Tapes are sent!

Vaccation time. I'm mentally offline (more than usual anyway) until mid august now!!! :-)
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Tapes have arrived safely in the post after our postie squished them through the letter box :(

Can you let me know your addy details by PM when you have a chance with your busy vacation time :thumbsup2:

Dave G 8)
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

SkydivinGirl said:
I would love to see some of those! Be sure to let us know when they are online.
Click to expand...

Sure will. I will try and get Space Wars by Tobias J. Richter converted and uploaded next week. Now there was a great 3D Amiga modeller and animatior.

Actually, I just had a look and it is already available on Youtube. However I want to encode it with good quality for anyone to download, rather than low quality streaming.

If you want to take a look it is here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aYzusXdvVI

I just picked up a CD-ROM from the other bay called the "Eric Schwartz Productions Archive". I'm going to have a lot of fun checking out all the good bits on there.

Heather
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I loved Eric Schwartz's animations. He was brilliant and really showed what Amiga animation could do. I've also got that CD and it is has some great stuff on there. Brought back loads of memories.
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

:mrgreen:

Amy the Squirrel sure knew how to pose! I received the disc but, as usual, I haven't had time to look at it yet.

@Harrison

Thanks for the link! I've never seen that before. I'd love to see it in High Quality later.

Heather
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

Better this Eric S. CD than the other he sells... :whistle: ...Fur afterdark (furry animals in porn action). <-the things you must to do to survive...
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

Only our much loved rkauer could come up with such a snippet of valuable information. :laugh: :mrgreen:

Kin
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

@arnljot

Tapes and DVDs will be winging their way back to you tomorrow night :nod:

Some technical info :laugh:

Standard DPaint IV is 59 minutes long and is 3.73GB

Advanced DPaint IV is 58 minutes long and is 3.65GB

The duplication house re-used old tapes. When the advanced version finished up popped a training video from ViaGrafix on using DOS on a PC :ROTFLOL2:

Dave G 8)
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

That must have been a bad duplication house, or just someone doing it on the cheap. Normally used tapes are wiped completely using a solid black screen and no sound to lay down a continuous control track before a tape is reused.

Are you going to try re-encoding the videos to try and make them smaller?

It is possible to make 1 hour of video much smaller. If it was rendered as Quicktime using the h.264 codec and using AAC audio with a datarate of 64 kbps, 16-bit, 44.1 khz mono you can often shrink a 1 hour video down to under 200MB! Great for internet distribution. It is often uncompressed audio that makes video files huge, and on tutorial videos you often only need mono audio.

However when rendering video always do a short 1 minute section first to test the end results. Sometime experimentation with different audio codecs and datarates is needed. Sometimes you can even cut to a slower datarate when only speech is used, or use some other codecs that are designed specifically for types of audio like speech or ambient.

Same is true of video codecs, but h.264 is a great one at compression while retaining quality.
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

@H

These were captured as high quality avi files with full stereo sound track at 720 * 576 @ 25 fps.

These were then written back onto DVDs after being trimmed and chaptered along with a menu using MPEG2 encoding through Pinnacle Studio Ultimate.

Although this may not be the best bit of software around it is good :thumbsup:

These could have been output in a suitable format for the web and would have reduced the size dramatically - but I'll leave that to arnljot :)

Dave G 8)
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

davideo said:
@H

These were captured as high quality avi files with full stereo sound track at 720 * 576 @ 25 fps.

These were then written back onto DVDs after being trimmed and chaptered along with a menu using MPEG2 encoding through Pinnacle Studio Ultimate.

Although this may not be the best bit of software around it is good :thumbsup:

These could have been output in a suitable format for the web and would have reduced the size dramatically - but I'll leave that to arnljot :)

Dave G 8)
Click to expand...

Thanks Dave. Your help is much appreciated. I'm still on vacation, and will be so for at some time more:) :)

I'll take care of it when it's over.
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

O/T but;

Heck Arnljot, you're always on vacation. :laugh: :wink: :pint:

Kin
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

@Kin

Wouldn't we all be if we had the opportunity and the cash :lol:

Dave G 8)
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

Oh Dave! - Absolutely. :nod:

Kin
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

@kin
Lol

I wish. April to july holds a lot of vacation days for vikings:)
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

Ah, ....it's that special rape & pillage quarter eh? :mrgreen: :beer:

Kin
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

Rape and pillage is over, and package is waiting for me at the post office.
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

Awesome work da-video!
 
Re: Digitizing amiga vhs tapes

@arnljot

Apologies for the delay in answering - we've been in Zetr0s area for the last five days.

I'm pleased that you liked them :thumbsup:

Dave G 8)
 
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