Hi, I just got an old JVC camcorder from my mom to play around with, it is old school, records onto VHS-C tapes, I was wondering eventually how I would be able to convert a VHS -> DVD, is this difficult, also what is required equipment wise? Thank you very much.
Firstly you will need to get the footage from your VHS-C tape onto your computer. The easiest way to do this is through an analog to digital converter box like a Canopus ADVC 110
http://www.canopus.us/US/products/Index/product_index.asp . It's pretty pricey at $300 but it will be able to convert any footage you have on VHS, SVHS, VHS-C etc. to the DV-AVI format which is perfect for editing and encoding. The AVI will be at a fixed 3.6 megabytes per second and you will not experience any problems with dropped frames (as long as your PC is stable) and video and audio going out of sync.
If you have a Digital 8 or miniDV camera lying around you can skip using the Canopus ADVC and use the "pass through" feature of your digital camera to digitize your footage. The advantages are identical to the Canopus ADVC box and you will have a DV-AVI file at a fixed 3.6 meg a second etc. etc. Basically you plug the output of your VHS-C camecorder into the input of your miniDV/Digital 8 recorder and then use a firewire cable to transfer the footage to your PC. Some of the newer lower end Digital 8 camera don't have this facility.
In my opinion the most difficult and error prone way of transferring your footage is through a capture card. You can pick up capture cards very cheaply but be prepared for a lot of trial and error and time consuming experimentation in order to find the best settings for your system. Be sure you do your research before taking this route.
Once your footage in on your PC, you will need to convert it into the MPG-2 format (which is the format that DVDs use). There are many MPG-2 encoders available, both free and commerical. TMPGENC is a good encoder but very slow. CCE Basic is a high quality encoder and it has the bonus of being very fast. CCE Basic is a scaled down version of the CCE SP encoder (which costs a couple of thousand dollars). You can buy CCE Basic for about $60. One of the major restrictions with CCE SP is that is restricted to 2 pass VBR recording. This should be fine in your circumstances. Procoder and MainConcept are other encoders you could consider. All of the encoders I've mentioned have trial versions which you can use to determine whether they meet your requirements.
If you're after a free encoder, then HC Encoder could be what you're after.
For comparisons check out the forums at Doom9.org (
http://forum.doom9.org/) particularly the "MPG1/2 Encoders" area.
The audio from your file can be left as it is (uncompressed as PCM) or it can be compressed (lossy) to AC3 or MP2. I would avoid using MP2. An example of a free AC3 encoder is "BeSweet" but some people have reported problems with certain Pioneer DVD players.
Once you finished with your audio and video streams it's time to author the DVD. Authoring is when you multiplex (combine) the audio and video streams into VOB files which are readable by a DVD player. In the authoring stage you can also create menus and chapter points in your video. I'd recommend DVD-Lab (
www.mediachance.com) if you want a full control over your DVD. Other authoring packages you can try out are DVD Architect, Adobe Encore. I'm not really familiar with any of the basic point and click packages so I can't suggest any of those.
So, there you have it. As you can see it's more involved than using a "standalone" DVD recorder but the results are certainly worth it if you do it right. Good luck.
Topic: VHS -> DVD Conversion, How Difficult, What Equipment Is Needed? (Read 2861 times)