VHS Camera using Formac's DV Converter works, capturing 4 vhs tapes!!

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Level 1

6 points

VHS Camera using Formac's DV Converter works, capturing 4 vhs tapes!!

WE have a small VHS camera that uses small( not standard size) vhs tapes. to watch in a vcr we would need an adaptor where you insert the small VHS tape into a standard size VHS tape container. But anyways, using RCA cables i can connect to formac's DV conveter and Final cut recognizes it right away and it works.

As you know regular VHS's could have up to 6 hours of video. The small ones though, are only like 1 hour or 2.

Have 2 nephews and the vhs's have recordings of each boy, either individually or both at the same time. I want to go through each tape and capture clips of each boy then also clips of the 2 boys together. Then make a dvd with 3 sections one for boy A , one for boy B, and one where the two are together. All i have right now as disk space is 2GB free in my mac's HD. 30GB in an external HD and planning to buy a 320 GB external drive soon. Would my project (capturing most of content of 4 small VHS tapes which are about 1 hour long each)fit in what i have now( 30GB ) or not???

any tips also, on how to go abut it? i guess also i'm planning using iDVD for burning

Have final cut express HD 3.5.1, AComdata 30GB external firewire drive, macos x 10.4.10

Posted on Sep 7, 2007 5:26 AM

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Answer 1

VJK

Level 5

4,260 points

Sep 7, 2007 7:14 AM in response to jonsondonson

First of all, you should really free up some space on your system drive. Its reccomended to have at least 25% of free space on your system drive for things like DVD encoding etc

Secondly, yes, you will need a larger external drive. S/VHS-C tapes usually hold 30 minutes of material on SP mode or one hour on LP ... can't recall seeing these tapes holding one hour at SP mode but maybe that exists. At any rate, you are looking at a minimal 2 hours of material if you capture everything on the tapes ... double that if they were recorded in LP mode.

DV tapes require 13-15 Gigs of storage per hour of tape. VHS, I am pretty sure, takes up more space than that. So, even if you were dealing with DV tapes, you would require a minimum 30 gigs to store all of the info from two VHS-C tapes recorded in SP mode ... and, again, VHS takes up more space. Even if you are not capturing everything on the tapes, you will come close to filling up your 30 G drive. Again, you want to leave at least 25% free space to work with ... not to mention space for any other media like music or Livetype files. So, I would definitely reccomend waiting till you get the larger drive ... will make your life so much easier. Make sure the drive is, at minimum, Firewire 4 and 7200 rpm

If you have the larger drive, I would reccomend capturing entire tapes (using DV Converter setting in FCE and Capture Now). This saves wear and tear on your cam by shuttling around and it is much easier and quicker to seek out shots in FCE.

Remember, iDVD has a limitation of two hours (using Best Quality setting) and I would reccomend keeping you DVD projects under 90 minutes to achieve best quality.

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Answer 2

Neil G

Level 3

770 points

Sep 7, 2007 1:27 PM in response to VJK

I agree with the comments about freeing up space and adding an external drive, Firewire preferred.

On space requirements: Analog converters spit out "DV" at the same rate as a DV camcorder but without the tape's time-code. So the space requirement per minute is the same. You can try capturing some VHS on the current external drive but it can't work for your larger project.

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Answer 3

VJK

Level 5

4,260 points

Sep 7, 2007 4:52 PM in response to Neil G

"Analog converters spit out "DV" at the same rate as a DV camcorder "

Um yeh .. of course .. I knew that ... can we blame it on me posting in between coffees? Thanks, Neil

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