Posted by Gene on 02/10/07 20:12

Amen, brother.
Could not have said it better myself.

BTW - I have not looked into MPEG4, yet - but it's on
my short list.

Anyone have any thoughts on just skipping on to
MPEG4 & roll the dice? If MPEG2 is OK (and I think it's
OK for old tapes), then would a looser MPEG4 (or ?) be a
better choice to store our old VHS, 8mm, and possibly Hi-8 tapes?
I'm guessing that it would save a LOT of space, but have not looked.
Please understand that it's ONLY for the old tapes,
not the current stuff I'm shooting today. Just the old VHS &
8mm standard low quality archived tapes.

The bottom line for me with the OLD archived 8mm & VCR tapes is this:
If you can burn a DVD that "a reasonable group of viewers" can not
distinguish in any way from the original tape on a 1080i TV, then that's all
I want.

"If" I ever do any editing, it will be simply cutting & pasting a bunch of
GOPs,
or whatever it takes, to get a complete set of frames. The worst case would
be to purchase software that converts VOBs to AVI. Doubt that anyone would
ever
know that there was a conversion with the old media.

I'm into archiving a LOT of hours, not producing a masterpiece for
distribution.
So a really loosey solution may be best for folks like me. Guess I really
should
go test out some of the newer MPEG4 camcorders & see if the product is as
bad
as folks seem to think it is.

Hmmm - wonder if any of the new MPEG4-AVC/H.264 camcorders have a pass-thru
to allow old analog camcorders to convert to MPEG4 via firewire, or even
USB2?
Wonder how large the MPEG4 (or whatever it ends up) file would be, and if it
plays
back with ~ the same quality as the original 8mm or VHS tapes on a 1080i TV
?
Bet you can stuff a lot of reasonably good quality VHS --> MPEG4 video on a
common
$0.30 DVD-R. Hard to believe that editing MPEG4 has not been thought out,
given
Sony, etc., are selling the MPEG4 camcorders now. Think I'll go do some
reading ...:-)

Gene







"HerHusband" <unknown@unknown.com> wrote in message
news:Xns98D36FF07B1Dherhusband@216.196.97.136...
>> Depends on what you are shooting. You do realize that
>> you are irretrievably throwing away a significant portion
>> of the quality of DV by compressing to MPEG.
>> OTOH, I have the expectation that television viewing
>> screens will get BETTER over time and that downgrading
>> my video to MPEG will turn out to be an even more
>> regrettable mistake when viewed from 5-10-20 years
>> out.
>
> The screens will improve over the next 20 years, but the video you have
> already recorded isn't going to change. Assuming you don't lose the video
> data, it'll be the same quality in 50 years as it is now. No, it won't
> look
> as good as modern HDTV, but it's old video afterall.
>
> I have 30+ year old video's that were shot on 8mm video cameras. The
> quality is terrible by today's standards, but it's still watchable. And
> the
> 9000kbps MPEG2 I use to compress the video still retains more quality than
> was available in the original 8mm tapes. Better than our old VHS tapes for
> that matter.
>
> I agree Mpeg is a bad choice if you are going to "edit" the video in the
> future, but in my case it is highly unlikely I'll have any reason to edit
> those old home movies in the future. Assuming file formats change in the
> future, I can still convert the movies to the new formats as needed (I've
> already tried and verified the quality before deciding on the format).
>
> If you are SURE you will never edit the videos, saving them in a high
> bitrate Mpeg2 format will save a lot of storage space.
>
> Anthony

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