Transferring VHSC camcorder tapes to pc using Dazzle

BrokeBrunette

Well many hours later I have just managed to capture my first film off an old tape. Going to try and edit it tomorrow but need sleep first!

A big thank you for all the help given to me today. I would never have been able to sort it otherwise.

BrokeBrunette

ok I tried to edit the first recording. Can anyone tell me what I should be converting the file into please?

I want to store all films on my pc but also be able to burn a copy onto disc/dvd so I can give a copy to my family.

There are endless choices - avi, mpeg 1 2 and 4, DivX and Windows Media are a few of them. If I put them into one type is it then possible to change the file at a later date if I have created the wrong one?

Sorry for all the questions. Thought this was going to be the easy bit but obviously not!

stilltheone

MPEG4, you can use that or DivX for storage as it creates smaller files. You can use MPEG2 too, but the files will be larger. No problem with further conversions.

BrokeBrunette

stilltheone wrote: »

MPEG4, you can use that or DivX for storage as it creates smaller files. You can use MPEG2 too, but the files will be larger. No problem with further conversions.

Thanks very much for coming back to answer my questions - much appreciated. I'm sure there must be less stressful ways to spend annual leave lol.

Will go and save a copy now, see what happens

spud17

BrokeBrunette wrote: »

I want to store all films on my pc but also be able to burn a copy onto disc/dvd so I can give a copy to my family.

After going to all this trouble and stress, , make sure that this is not your only copy.

Burn them all to DVD, store on external hard drive, etc.

KillerWatt

Keep them in raw AVI (720x576 @ 25fps) if you want to transcode them to DVD, and you'll want a very fast machine if you expect the transcoding to be done in a reasonable time frame (that's transcoding to any format, not just DVD).

For raw AVI, you'll need around 13GB of disk space for an hour of footage.

googler

BrokeBrunette wrote: »

Didn't even think about this actually. The recordings are very bitty and I was going to try and edit them into decent videos without all the gaps in between. One birthday party video has about 4 gaps in it so I was going to edit them out.

With a hard-disk DVD recorder, you can transfer them to the HDD, and burn the DVDs from there. No messing around with software, much quicker, etc.

Tifefutty

Hey Friend I m new to this community just want to say hello.

BrokeBrunette

ok another frustrating day on this. For anyone still bothering to read this nightmare today went as follows:

After reading everyone's advice on here I decided the most sensible thing to do was to take the first clip I had copied onto the laptop and see it through to the final product on my pc. I didn't want to spend hours getting all my old tapes onto my laptop and then find what I was doing didn't work. So I now have the same film 3 times, in 3 different formats - mpeg4, avi and the original movie clip in Dazzle.

The plan was to put all 3 versions over to my pc (using my portable, external hard drive), watch them to make sure they played ok and then burn a dvd, using all 3 versions, again to see if/which one worked.

Good in theory but not so good in reality. So far I have failed to be able to transport the avi file in any way whatsoever. It keeps saying the file is to big to be put onto my portable drive, which is rubbish as the file is 8G and my portable drive has loads of space.
The mpeg 4 played well on my pc but the format couldn't be put onto a dvd so couldn't test that and the final version, the original movie clip played fine on my pc and when I put it onto dvd didn't play properly (no sound and just played random parts of the movie clip, instead of the 30min in correct order.

I'm actually now thinking would it be better to just wait until some hardware comes out that will support my Windows 7 64bit and then I won't have the hassle of trying to download then move it onto my pc. I'm finding it difficult as I'm not that proficient at this sort of stuff anyway and all the moving of files etc is just making it harder.

If anyone is still reading this then thanks

I appreciate all the comments yesterday but have no idea how to multi quote so I won't, but I can't just burn the tapes to dvd as they need editing, hence this epic saga.

stilltheone

If your portable drive is formatted in FAT, it won't work...as that filesystem can only hold individual files of 4GB maximum. You have to format the external HDD to NTFS. Don't do it before transferring everything from the drive beforehand.

As to the other files, use DVD Flick to create your DVD Video disc. It's easy when you know how, don't give up. Read the Guide