Tech Reaction

A few years ago a friend of mine approached me with a huge project, he had something like 200+ VHS and Beta tapes of old football games that he collects and wanted them encoded onto DVD’s. He also had a few computer parts that we assembled to create a Capture/Encoding work station with and then the fun began.

To capture the old tapes we used a Canopus ADVC-1394 capture card which is some what of an older card but still worked very well for what we wanted to do. One of the quirks this card had was it would not run on a Win XP fully updated machine, so I used just a plan Win XP install and never updated it. This was fine as it would only be used for this.

So we had an older PC all setup running a Pentium 4 dual core installed in an Apevia X-Qpack case with several hard drives to store all the captures and provide editing/encoding work space.

This is the CPUz screen of what is actually running in this box, you can see that its nothing major here.

The tape decks my friend had that we would use for this.

Beta Deck – Sony SL2710
VHS Deck – JVC HR-S9911U
DVD Deck – Panasonic DMR-E20

Everything worked pretty well and I started off capturing, encoding and burning DVD’s. What I would do back then as I wanted this to be as streamed lined as possible because of the huge number of tapes to work on was to capture 3 tapes at a time which could be anywhere from 2 hour, 4 hour, or 6 hour recordings. When that was done I would edit to clean up split these huge files into parts that would fit onto a DVD. These would then be batched up and encoded which would take almost a solid week of encoding time. Those files would then be burnt to a DVD and then move on to the next batch of tapes.

All that took about a year to complete and the encoding machine setup was put aside as that project was finished up.

Well wouldn’t you know it, my friend simply cannot pass up any old tape that he finds and stops by the other day with a box of tapes he found in the back of a recycling center. Oh joy I get to start this up again LOL !

Pulling all the stuff back out I setup the system on the side of my bench and slowly figured out how it all went together and worked.

So the capture/encoding station lives on !

The software I used for this capturing the video is Vegas Video LE 3.0 and it looks something like this while capturing.

The captured raw files tend to be rather large, ~50gb’s+ so they need to be edited to clean up things and then split into sizes that will fit on a DVD. Generally a football game will need to be split into two DVD’s to keep the max resolution and detail that I can get with these old tapes.

For this part of the process I used TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress which allows me to edit and encode very easy and then batch up all the encoding.

When I did all this before I encoded on the Pentium 4 machine and that took a fair amount of time, almost 3 hours per DVD. Now I copy those files over to my main rig which has a 965XE at 3.9ghz and do the editing/encoding there which only takes ~23 minutes per DVD so its much faster with 8 threads working on this vs 2.

After the files are encoded its time to burn DVD’s. For this I use TMPGEnc Author 1.6 and its also pretty simple to do.

So that’s pretty much the process and it actually goes pretty smoothly. Many of these tapes that I did are rather old, this football game was 9-13-93 and recorded off of regular TV so quality was not the best, some of the older tapes I have done are late 60’s.

One other thing that you can do with all this software is encode to a mpeg file, or a whole host of other formats and save them on your HDD so they can be called up at any time. I can see another huge project coming down the line LOL

Another thing I used this setup for was Audio encoding from old LP’s and Cassette  tapes. I picked up a D.A.K. USB turntable back then that worked pretty well.

http://www.dak.com/reviews/2020story.cfm

For capturing and editing the Audio I used Audio Cleaning Lab 11 deluxe. This software has some very nice features like removing hiss and crack and pop filters for cleaning up the sound of old LP and tapes.

So an older machine with a few added features can be turned into a very useful work station. Being able to archive old VHS and Beta tapes that you may have laying around is a big plus. Taking our LP and Cassette collections and capturing them and with a little clean up they can be turned into really nice sounding files that can be archived or burnt to a CD for your enjoyment at home or in your car.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed it !