Question : Transfer my whole collection of 8mm (Video 8) Analogue Video tapes to PC - fastest way, size / quality trade-off - Any Advice ?

Hi

I have a collection of probably 30 or so 90 minute home video tapes in Video 8 format, all taken with my trusty Sharp Viewcam.

I have transfered some to VHS, but I spend so much time in front of my PC and so little in front of the TV, I would like to have the convenience of having them archived on my PC.

I have searched through the existing questions on Experts Exchange, but can't find any answers that directly solve my solution, so I'm asking for help !!!!

I have a capture care (AverMedia PCI card) which we have captured video with in the past, but the files seem absolutely massive.

Can anyone tell me the best way to capture a whole tape at a time, and have it saved at a decent resolution, so I could copy it to VCD / DVD if I wanted to, and watch it on a normal TV at VHS quality if need be, but also store it on a hard drive....

As I said, there are around 30 Video 8 tapes, all 90 minutes long - so there's a lot of footage - how many MB's would each take, given that I want to preserve the quality as much as possible.

Also, what's the best package to use to compress / process / save these, and what format - .avi ? - I am clueless in this field, so please help !!!!

I have a Pentium 2GHz PC with 1GB Ram, and plenty of hard drive space - will this be capable, or is capturing a whole movie exclusively Mac territory ?

Many thanks

Matt Wilkes

P.S.
I am awarding maximum points, but as I have tried long and hard and failed to find a satisfactory way of capturing more than a 5 minute clip, I am also prepared to PayPal you the cost of a crate of Bud's as a big *THANK YOU* for a successful answer :-)

Answer : Transfer my whole collection of 8mm (Video 8) Analogue Video tapes to PC - fastest way, size / quality trade-off - Any Advice ?

Hi
If you are capturing video, the easiest way to do it is to press play on tape and record it all to your computer via the capture card. Keep in mind that 10 min of video is about 1gig of hdd space (uncompressed .AVI). If you are thinking of editing it after capturing, this will take you forever with that big a clip.
But for just capturing to record onto a dvd and store as a memory, it is easiest to capture it in one piece.
The best way is to capture is without any compression whatsoever. Use .avi and not mpeg, mov etc.

The computer you have seems to be ut for the job, no worries there. When the video is captured, the best way to encode it is using divx/xvid. This will compress it in excellent quality video/sound and will be easy to re-encode if you want to burn the video to a dvd later. You can search google.com for free tools to use for enconding.

Depending on the quality you choose to compress the video in, it will probably take a day at least to compress the whole 90 minutes of tape, so be patient. I would capture a little piece of video, compress it in different qualities (bitrates) and see how low i could go before i was no longer satisfied with the result. This way you dont waste time encoding somthing not good enough to keep.

Keep in mind that while encoding the video you wont be able to use it for anything else.

Good luck