Knightmare VHS Capturing

[SteveH]

Hi, i have the "complete" knightmare collection of VHS care of adam battesby but was thinking i should try and digitally capture it and author it to either a dvd (mpeg2)or save them as avi's. However i am having trouble with doing this, either due to quality of the tapes or interference of my own system (basically it looks pretty bad on the computer screen) and i was just wondering if anyone else has tried to do this??

PS - Is there any news about the official DVD release's may save me trying to do this!!

thanks
Steve

[Fidjit]

If you are capturing from video to PC then make sure all the settings are correct and that it is plugged in. What software are you using? I use Adobe Premiere it has much better quality to it but it takes up approximately 80MB per minute!

If you are considering to put it up on knightmare.com it is nessecary to change them to .RM .RA .RAM formatted files, alternitively (if I've spelt that right) you can use a .MPEG (which is almost certainly what you are using)

What did you use to capture..?

DIGITAL CAMERA
VIDEO CAMERA

If you used either of these. Try capturing them as .AVI formatted files. .AVI's are the usual files from cameras and video cameras as such

If you still have difficulties, I can contact my Video Production lecturer and technician Jon Stone and he might help out with your problem...

[SteveH]

Yep im capturing from vcr to pc, but analogue capturing. Ive tried adobe premiere and IuVCR and PowerVCR II but i keep getting the same interference (see pic)
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/pete.howell/lines.jpg
(Btw the bottom shouldnt be lighter then the top, thats just a picture error but there are consistant horizontal lines every inch or so on the screen which is the problem) But i dont want to start capturing until i can get rid of this. I have a composite in on my ATI gfx card (and an s-video) i have to use the composite as the svideo comes out black and white. The composite is coming out of a scart 2 phono adaptor out the back of my tv/vcr combi (the lines are still there on a standalone vcr). Ive read in forums to use uncompressed AVI's to start with like the Huffy codec then convert after, (ive got HD space so thats ok) and then i may try and author them to a DVD or just make DIVX files from them.
Any help with the interference problem would be helpful! I didnt know if it was just the resolution of the moniter finding errors in the video which you cant see on the tv.

Steve

[WhiteDevil]

Try capturing with Virtualdub, http://www.virtualdub.org - it works well and its free. Theres also plenty of support for it. Its small so it might be worth a try...

[SteveH]

yea ive tried that, and most other programs, just keeps having same awful picture, i guess its the old vids, just u cant see the distortion on the tv because of the lower resolution, but u can see it on the high resolution pc moniter.

[WhiteDevil]

Can you not capture at a lower resolution?

[SteveH]

I tried it at 640x352 , it looked a bit better actually but i tried it with a later series, so the tape quality was better. The interference lines were closer together so you couldnt see them as much.
Cheers for the advice,
Now i gotta author a cool knightmare dvd

[WhiteDevil]

Which series did you capture in the end? Im glad to hear it came out alright, ill have to stick to VHS for now

[SteveH]

Series 7 - wierd though, it was series 2 and 8 which came out funny, ill have to work on that. I just thought it was time to put it on DVD incase the tapes died!!! Shame i havent got challenge, i could record it straight off there!

[WhiteDevil]

Hehehe, ive got a video capture card, but you need a massive hard drive to be able to capture 30 minutes of material. Had looked into it, but i would need loads of DVDs to be able to stick all the material on there, unless i can compress it into DivX (then i would need a DivX DVD player which i dont have)...

[MoanaLiza]

I have a divX player installed onto my computer, but don't know if it plays dvds though. I downloaded it from divX.com. Mines the free version so actially I don't think I can and also I havn't tried it. on the website there are things that you can purchase such as a digital video converter for $159 (not sure how much in pounds though), dr divX (which you could also get a trial of), a dvd player that is the first official divX certified dvd player ($300 though), WinDVD creator 2 platinum ($99.95), movie maker deluxe 3 ($40), and plenty of other stuff. I just hope that if you do get around to creating your dvd(s) I hope that you are keeping it/them for your own home personal only, but I think you know about all that!

[SteveH]

Yea i got a massive HD, maybe gonna buy DIVX player after exams =( But thought it a good idea to cap the old vhs tapes so they cant degrade. Although tbh the vhs tapes look better then ne caps that ive managed so far.

PS im not trying to sell them, i just want a copy for myself thats not gonna demagnatise in time!

[WhiteDevil]

Ive got the DivX player/free codec on my pc so i can encode it, but i need some way of playing it in my DVD player before converting in DivX is a viable option.

MPEG is the other way of doing it, will have to research what my DVD player can do though

Did a little bit of calculation that might be of use to you Steve....

Using Lifeview TVR video capture software in MPEG format: (this is where my 80GB hard drive will come in useful)

11MB/second, 25 minutes/episode, 16 episodes/series

11*25 = 275MB/episode
275MB * 16 = 4440MB (4.44GB) / series

Most DVDs can take 120mins/4.7GB of media - so i can fit 1 episode on each DVD. In thoery

[Snowcat]

That sounds about right.

The lines that appear on screen could well be caused by the tracking of your VCR. I've tried some similar tricks using a Hauppage 'win TV 2000' card and found that the VCR tracking had to be spot on to avoid massive V-hold problems. Also remembering that Battersbys tapes were never copied particularly well (from what I've seen of them anyway) in the first place.

It's the old S-I-B-S-O principal...

S**t In, Bull-S**t Out

One thing that I'm having problems with is trying to capture anymore than a few seconds of video without dropping frames all over the place. My Hard Disk is definately big enough (200 Gb), but it can't seem to keep up during capture and hangs... Any tricks that may be useful (other than the usual 'shutdown all but this' advice)???

[Fear]

I have decided i shall tape all episodes now so when it goes off air i can still enjoy the action.