'On the fly' conversion ??
 

G'day all,

Not sure where to put this so hopefully it's in the right spot.

I just had a client ask about converting 450 hours of vhs tapes to 'something' (div X maybe) that will go on 2 x 500GB hard drives....does anyone know of anything that'll do it 'on the fly' or suggest a simple(r) method.

450 hours is long enough without adding in rendering time.

Appreciate any suggestions...cheers..Paul.

You could use a DVD recorder which will burn directly to DVD. Then rip the DVD's to the hard drive. Or you might find a recorder with an internal hard drive which can transfer the data out faster than realtime, but I don't have any experience with those.

WOW! 450 HOURS? How much are you charging for that? Your going to have to buy some form of DVR to do that without capturing and then rerendering. However there may be some sort of hardware capture card that does hardware encoding of mpeg-2/mpeg-4 such as some of the ATI or Haupaugge "Media Center" type cards.

Hi Paul .. funny, I am doing a project exactly like that right now (300+hours of tape plus possibly another 150).

But, I am capturing then encoding (quicktime is the requested format). This way they will have the AVI's for future project, and we are also doing 2 different QT formats.

In addition, I am trimming, cropping, deinterlacing, adding a little noise reduction, changing gamma, etc., so have a few things set up for it, and felt I got very good results by doing it the more traditional way (although if the request was for mpeg, DVD recorder would definitely be the way to go).

This customer also wanted jpeg images of the videos and scene detected AVIs and QTs, so I have that built into the workflow as well (will help when they put it online).

I tend to capture the batch they send me, e.g. get any TBC, hardware color correction, noise reduction, etc. out of the way, then once everything is set up on the PC, do all the software based work, since I can just let it run, check on it, then kick off the next, etc.

Average is 1 day / tape, so not quick but not terrible. I could pick up an extra pc for the encoding, which is the most time consuming part, but so far, the pace matches what they are looking for and their ability to review the files, ingest, etc.

And, I have one word for you - BACKUP :-) .
Actually three words - BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP.

Got some extra drives to keep redundant copies on site and while the drives are in transit to/from the customer.

Good luck w/ the project!

G'day Dave, Noah, Boyd,

Thanks for the replies. I'm out of the office more than in at the moment with a month solid of shooting, hence I haven't taken the job on as yet. Not sure I will the way they want it as I probably can't manage it time wise...unless I can find an easier way of doing it.

1 tape/day is going to take too long so I may have to pass...thanks for all your suggestions.

cheers..Paul.

i think the DVD recorder idea is a good one. perhaps though one could just get a DVD + HD recorder, digitise onto the hard drive and THEN remove the harddrive from the DVD recorder, mount it on a PC or mac and copy the files. stops you from having to burn and rip files using DVDs. just a thought