Digitizing VHS tapes and compression.

[undetz]

As the topic says.

There's a large number of old VHS tapes that need to be saved in digital format, but the process isn't exactly ideal. The program of choice is Pinnacle Studio which first creates an mpeg file between 12 and 20 GB in size, then creates a DVD from that. In order to get it down to a reasonable size it would have to be ripped again from the DVD. That's 3 conversions with an unknown outcome. Simply burning them all on DVDs is possible, but tedious and not very practical. Especially since there are thoughts of setting up a central storage for easy access from a closed network, >4GB large files would make that very difficult.

Now, my intuition (which may be dead wrong) tells me that there has to be a better way of doing this.

While the contents of the VHS tapes are in theory extremely high quality, practically they amount to 240p-360p. What I would like best is a way to convert the contents of the huge .mpeg file of near-perfect quality to something reasonable, like 700-1000MB.


Help me out, encoders. Is there any way to get a VHS tape of anywhere between 2 and 4 hours down to a reasonable size while still keeping it watchable?

[wizisi2k]

what I have done on ONE VHS tape is to capture the output via composite on my Happuage 2250 HVR card using the "best" quality setting (6500 kbps video bitrate 384 kbps audio bitrate).  The result was about 7 GB for the 143 minute video.  The DOWNSIDE of this method is you need a lot of space and you have to literally sit at the computer, using their propritary viewer to record the output as well as hookup the VCR cables to the composite input for the tuner.  What you are asking for is actually several things because no all-in-one can keep the quality of a VCR tape.  You are in reality asking for a app that can capture, a specalized script to minimize the damage due to age (varying settings used based on the film damage) for each .ts for use in megui, and they might be larger than 1 GB.  The actual resolution I grabbed it at is 480p.  Long story short yes it's doable but it's tedious and gonna take forever to encode.  This is from my experience that you need to research film restoration filters and decide settings to use yourself because default settings might worsen things altho they may reduce the size to the rage you want.

[Temuthril]

While the contents of the VHS tapes are in theory extremely high quality, practically they amount to 240p-360p. What I would like best is a way to convert the contents of the huge .mpeg file of near-perfect quality to something reasonable, like 700-1000MB.

Start reading about AviSynth and x264.

http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Main_Page
http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Settings

[Pentium100]

Is there any way to get a VHS tape of anywhere between 2 and 4 hours down to a reasonable size while still keeping it watchable?

It will be difficult. Maybe I do not know ome of the more advanced encoding tricks, but it basically comes down to this: VHS is analog, so it has noise (it may be picture noise ("snow") or timebase errors), noise, being random, does not compress well. You should buy a TimeBase Corrector, it should reduce the timebase errors. Then you can filter out the picture noise somehow. to make it more compressible.

By the way, VHS has 480i (NTSC) or 576i (PAL). What is reduced, is the horizontal resolution, that is, while the maximum resolution for PAL is roughly 720x576, VHS has something like 300x576.
Also, VHS is interlaced. If you intend to watch the file on a CRT TV, encode it as interlaced (x264 supports that), otherwise you will have to deinterlace first.