Questions about editing/storage ???

[wyerstuff]

Hi, I'm looking for some advice if anyone would be kind enough to help.

I have around 30 8mm and another 30 Mini DV tapes which i've been meaning to get around to archiving and editing for years but never really got around to it. I did buy Pinnacle Studio V9 a couple of years back (still have it) but it seemed to be a bit buggy as far as i remember and kept crashing but i suppose that could have been a problem with my PC, anyway I got sidetracked / bored and put it on the shelf.

A couple of weeks ago i recorded my Niece's wedding in Sweden and had it converted to DVD for them, which they were delighted with and it's got me interested again in the home video - DVD archiving editing project. But after delving in a bit my head is starting to hurt with all of the questions coming to mind such as : which editing software? what format do i store it in? which DVD copier/burner? etc......

The firm who converted the wedding mini dv tape to DVD for me also converted one of my old 8mm tapes to DVD and they seem to play in all DVD players we have in the house including the PS3 and the PC's. Both DVD's have around 1 hour of footage and are 3 gigabites of VOB files. I've just sent 10 more of my 8mm tapes to them and am hoping to get them back this week.

My plan is then to find a simple and quick way to store / label / edit / copy / burn all of my videos so that for example if i want to knock up a DVD for a mate of mine who's kids feature in several of my old tapes, i can do if fairly quickly with the dvd working as my VOB versions seem to on most players.

I have been playing this morning with some free software called convertvobtoavi and storing the converted video to a 500gb "buffalo" nas drive. I converted some to WMV and some to MPEG4 which i was then able to access wirelessly from my laptop. But my PS3 in the living room, although seeing the video files wouldn't play them (say's the files are corrupted)

Anyway sorry for the ramble, i suppose my questions are:-

Have i done the right thing getting my tapes converted to DVD in VOB ?

Should i use my buffalo nas drive to then store all the video so that i can view it on my network and use it as the source for editing?

If yes to above, what format should i store it as?

What software should i use for the editing (using a PC), burning etc?....


Many Thanks

Steve

[MarkE19]

Pinacle Studio is a great & easy to learn and use program. But it is very common for it to be hard work just getting it to stay running on many PC's. For some they will never have a crash, but others have crashes of the software all the time. The best advice is to install it and then make sure you have all the updates for it from Pinnacle support.
If you can't get Pinnacle Studio to run without crashing then have a look at the likes of Sony Vegas Studio, Ulead Video Studio, Adobe Premiere Elements etc etc (a search will bring up all the favourite software). All the recent versions of these programs should be able to do the capture, editing and DVD creation from your origional tapes if you still have a camcorder to play them.

If you do the capture yourself then the best format is DV .AVI as this is uncomressed (well as good as) so will not loose quality as you work on the footage. If however you are working from a DVD then keep the video in the MPEG-2 format that it is on the disc. Converting from one format to another will result in a fair amount of quality loss. Most of the programs (if not all of them) should be able to load the video directly off the DVD disc for editing.
Once you have finished editing then you can burn it to another DVD and then perhaps convert to say DivX for storage on you HDD as these files will be a fair bit smaller.

Mark.

[wyerstuff]

Just installed my old pinnacle V9 software on my Laptop (vista), updated it, seemed to work for a while , then crashed. I,ve put it back on the shelf to gather more dust. Actually i might as well sling it, it's a 2004 product so no doubt well out of date now anyway.

Just b4 it crashed i was trying to import source video from DVD (VOB files) but couldn,t find a way. So whatever software i do use i would like to have this option as well as the ability to burn to DVD.

Any views on my idea to use my 500gb buffalo nas drive as storage?

Thanks

[JefUK]

Pinnacle Studio 9 is not compatible with Vista.

I use Studio 12.1 Ultimate with many plug-ins/ad-ons and it is perfectly stable on Vista 64. More stable than any other application I have - other than Office!

Provided your PC meets the recommended requirements it should work reliably. History has shown that Studio software works best on PC's with Intel chipsets, and can be sensitive to unconventional setups and installations.

Studio 9 and 12 does provide for the importation of VOB's - it's under "File", although it may not work with Studio 9 under Vista.

Archiving video is a very debatable subject, but to preserve the best (original) quality they should be stored as DV AVI's to avoid further and repeated compression loss.

Eight years ago I faced the same problem of having dozens of analogue video tapes that I eventually wanted to edit. I bought the best analogue to digital converter at the time, a Canopus ADVC 100, and converted them all to DV AVI's. When the conversion was complete I sold the convertor on eBay for almost the same price that I paid for it. The Canopus converters are much in demand due to the conversion quality.

I was then faced with the problem of long term storage. Hard drives were much smaller in those days and it would have required several drives to store all the data. After looking at the options, costs, and risks I decided to store them on DVD's. At that time DVD blanks were very new and cost several pounds each, and I needed about 100 of them! I bought the cheapest budget brand discs that I could find and simply transferred the AVI files onto them. With some discs the writer could not read the initialising track and required several attempts to start writing. At the time I was obviously concerned that the discs would not be readable after a few years, however, today every disc is still perfectly readable. This shows that medium term DVD storage can be a reliable and cheap medium.

Since that time I have edited all the video and have now have them as DVD-Video discs, complete with backups stored in separate locations.

If you decide to take this route then I would suggest that you use the best quality branded discs and store them vertically in jewel cases, inside a box in a low humidity and constant temperature environment. A sealed container with silica-gel would be a good idea to minimise risk.

As a long term builder/repairer of PC's experience leads me to trust well stored good quality DVD's more than hard drives!