[geeks] I haven't gotten into this yet but I need some advice

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 12:50:03PM -0400, Andrew Weiss wrote:
> My mother wants to take all her tapes of my childhood and my brother's 
> and put them on a preserved format.  She was originally thinking of 
> DVD-R, but she has too old of a Mac to make this cost effective at the 
> moment (9600/233)
> 
> She'd like to know the easiest and cheapest way of preserving these 
> dying videos on either the Mac or the PC.
> 
> She was looking at the CD Video Recorder on www.terapintech.com, but I 
> was wondering what disadvantages or advantages this held since I am not 
> a video person.

Gah, that's expensive.  If all you want is video CDs, then could you just
buy her a CD-RW drive and something like the Miro DC-30.  The pair of items
shouldn't cost more than about $200 together, plus more hard drive space
will be needed.

But, VideoCDs suck.  Even if you switch to Super Video CDs (which only store
2/3s the video length of regular VideoCD, which is to say about 45mins), they 
still suck, quality wise. You really would get the best results by using the 
minimum compression rate (meaning maximum data rate) possible onto DVD-Rs, 
but even that could be problematic.  

If your concern is VHS tape wearing out, fading with age, I might recommend
finding a way to digitize the video at the best quality possible (preferably
4:2:2 uncompressed), then storing it to a quality tape back up, that can be
rewritten to new tapes and verified every five years.  I'd say put the 
uncompressed video onto archival CDs, but that would be a rediculous number of
CDs.  Barring that, digitize it with 4:2:2 and play with compression to get
the best results, but remeber, m-jpeg isn't a fixed standard, so be carefull
not to use a proprietary hardware based standard that won't work with other
computers.  Then you can run off copies to what ever is convienient for viewing
until something better comes along.

Of course, the best archival method would be good old film.  It isn't likely
that we will ever loose a method for viewing film stored images.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd