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Originally Posted by New Homebrew
It's all good stuff, and it's fun to buy new toys. The real problem is for the person who is converting only a small amount of tapes. Once you figure the cost of quality hardware, cables, software, and the massive time and learning investment, sending off your tape and $25 for someone else to do it is the best deal in the world!
The only concern I would have about using a mini-DV cam for pass-through is the audio... I would think that most of them yield a compressed audio stream rather than LPCM? I am always in favor of using uncompressed audio whenever possible.
It would be nice for some of us to put together some information on recommended hardware and software for this sort of thing. The idea being to see that people with worthwhile tapes get the optimum quality from them.
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actually, for miniDV (or digital8) pass through, the audio *IS* in uncompressed LPCM audio in the DV .AVI file, at DVD spec 16-bit/44.1kHz. you can use VirtualDub to extract the WAV file, or Premiere to Export it, and i think Scnealyzer (great capturing program) can actually write the uncompressed WAV file by itself (separate) from the video file.
good point - if a person has only a handful of tapes, it's better to find someone who will convert the tape (in exchange for getting to keep a copy of the DVD for themselves), or to pay a minimal fee to have it done.
i would advise against having someone do it who uses a standalone recorder. don't get me wrong, i have some good quality DVDs made from standalone recorders (off miniDV master tapes), but if there are scenes with a lot of motion, a 2-pass VBR encoding in TMPEG or CCE will beat the standalone encoding easily (i.e. you'll have little-to-no pixelation during the high-motion scenes).
a VHS/video > DVD FAQ would be great, i think. in an ideal world, everyone would use better quality equipment, and better quality software. i appreciate even the lesser quality releases people put out, but imagine moving ahead by everyone using *better* methods for DVD encoding.
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