Capturing video Hi8 with Edius

[dpalomaki]

A good analog tape player will include a line TBC, that ensures each video line has proper timing and sync pulses at the analog output. In many (but not all) cases the analog output of the VCR also has frame timing inaccuracies that an external frame TBC can correct. (And in a few cases it might make things worse, depends on the signal coming out of the player.)

This is because the consumer home video formats (VHS, S-VHS, 8mm, Hi8, and Beta) were built to work with home TVs and with cost in mind, so everything was based on the lowest cost system that produced a first generation playback image that is acceptable to most home consumers. (Home TVs generally tolerate sloppy signals better than most video capture cards.)

If you plan to do serious video restoration/correction the best capture format is a lossless 4:2:2 format. This preserves all the video signal, with its noise, for later processing in the digital domain with sophisticated tools. (Capture to a lossy format (including DV) will give up some image information along with some noise in the interest of bandwidth.) There are lossless formats that do provide some compression (a bit like ZIP file compression), but they still require a lot more storage than DV files. (Lossy formats have compression artifacts that will become exaggerated during decoding/decoding cycles and processing round-off/truncation.

It all boils down to how good is good enough for your purposes.

[Haddock]

Originally Posted by dpalomaki

A good analog tape player will include a line TBC, that ensures each video line has proper timing and sync pulses at the analog output. In many (but not all) cases the analog output of the VCR also has frame timing inaccuracies that an external frame TBC can correct. (And in a few cases it might make things worse, depends on the signal coming out of the player.)

This is because the consumer home video formats (VHS, S-VHS, 8mm, Hi8, and Beta) were built to work with home TVs and with cost in mind, so everything was based on the lowest cost system that produced a first generation playback image that is acceptable to most home consumers. (Home TVs generally tolerate sloppy signals better than most video capture cards.)

If you plan to do serious video restoration/correction the best capture format is a lossless 4:2:2 format. This preserves all the video signal, with its noise, for later processing in the digital domain with sophisticated tools. (Capture to a lossy format (including DV) will give up some image information along with some noise in the interest of bandwidth.) There are lossless formats that do provide some compression (a bit like ZIP file compression), but they still require a lot more storage than DV files. (Lossy formats have compression artifacts that will become exaggerated during decoding/decoding cycles and processing round-off/truncation.

It all boils down to how good is good enough for your purposes.

Thanks for these complement of explanation. For VHS/SVHS I have studio equipment of Sony analogic that gives me the best possible result. For 8/Hi8, I was just wondering if the inside converter was good enough. Having no serious analyzer my experience is giving similar result between DV/analogic... I was asking forum just to be sure.

[Haddock]

Another point that can be interesting for my client....

Some clients want only "digitilizing" their video cassette or film and want to receive a "universal" readable files on any computer.

Capturing with Edius (analogic or via DV) gives in the properties "Canopus DV.avi".

I know that there is also Microsoft DV : AVI Files Containing One DV Data Stream (Type-1)

Is it possible to choose this codec immediately with Edius ???