I am very interested in converting home movies shot on Sony Hi8 camcorder to VCDs.

My question is very basic: When I convert the video from the camcorder into an MPEG1 file, does this capture all of the characteristics of the video or does it lose something in transition? My ultimate desire is to preserve my aging video until I can convert all of my files to DVD in the future. In other words which is better?

1) camcorder to VCD to DVD or 2) camcorder to DVD (when this becomes more economical).

Thanks in advance for any advice...

-- paul hurst (paul.hurst@netzero.net), July 02, 2002

Answers

No room for doubt, VCD will prevent your footage from aging, but the sole act of converting Hi-8 to VCD will "age" your footage in many years in a wipe. Let me clarify: Hi-8 is a high bandwith, high quality format, even better than SuperVHS. VCD on the other hand, is a low-bandwidth, low-quality format. Sure, you can get a nice looking VCD done, but that's for the untrained eye. If you appreciate quality -and if you have Hi-8 I bet you do- don't ever consider transferring these tapes to VCD. Just go straight to DVD or, more accomplishable, ask a friend for a DV camera and transfer your footage into digital tape. This is the most reasonable solution...

-- Matias (aguantematu@yahoo.com), July 02, 2002.

Or if u can't wait u might want 2 try SVCD. SVCD retains a few of the characteristics of DVD, including the use of MPEG-2 (which in turn means the identity of the two distinct fields in a frame is preserved). It's true that other than preserving on disc the contents of your Hi8, VCD will actually degrade your picture quality in varying degrees.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), July 03, 2002.

I would agree with the previous posters you will loose quality in moving to MPEG1/VCD. To add to this i would suggest try to transcode to another format like Divx/Xvid or apple Pixlet format and save on to computer. So if you do not have a DVD burner you will at least have the highest video and audio your Hi8 puts out (over Analog to digital). Save to HDD.

-- Roger Joseph (roger_joseph@hotmail.com), August 11, 2004.

Camcorder to DVD is definitely better. For 2 reasons.

1) VCD is of very poor quality compared to DVD. Converting it back to DVD later will not resurrect the quality. Information is lost in the first step, and it cannot be regained later.

2) The more conversions you do, the more quality you lose. Different compression schemes throw away different parts of the original data. When you do one compression on top of another, more of the original data is lost. This does not translate into smaller files, but does make for lower quality.

You get the best quality if you convert the video at the highest resolution possible, and store it using a lossless codec like Huffyuv. You are going to end up with hundred GB files, but if it's an important event like a wedding, it might be worth it. :)

Realistically, most people trade off some quality in return for smaller files. Where the balance lie is up to each person. It will also change with time. Today I digitize at 768x576, and compress with Xvid (quantization level 4), and LAME MP3-160kbps at 44.1KHz. This produces files about 700MB to 1GB per hour. I think, this result in a better-than-DVD quality. But I'm sure, in 10 years time, when DVD's successors stores 20GB per disc, I'll be asking myself why I bother doing the compression at all. I'll be kicking myself wishing that I had used a lossless compression that preserves maximum picture quality.

I have another question. In MiniDV, the video is compressed by the camera and stored digitally on tape. When we transfer the video to a computer with a firewire cable, the data is transferred without conversion or loss of quality. The video sits on the computer compressed using the MiniDV codec. But when we connect a Hi8 camera to a video-capture card, there is a conversion/resampling/recompress step, which result in data loss.

Is there a way to transfer the original digital data from Hi8 without any conversion the same way we transfer MiniDV tapes? What is the compression method used on Hi8 tapes?

-- Daniel Khoo (gsf_oohk@fzz.no-ip.info), August 16, 2004.