There is a good selection of online guides to capturing analogue video. Although these are generally some years old, as analogue sources are getting rarer, their information is still relevant. I followed the comprehensive Doom 9 capture guide for analogue sources, but with some minor modifications as noted below. They recommend the Huffyuv encoder, which I found difficult to install in 64-bit Windows 7, so if I was doing it again I'd try the more modern Lagarith codec instead. They're both lossless, so which you use shouldn't matter.
My PC already possesses a video capture port, but if it didn't then composite to USB video capture devices cost a pittance these days. The actual capturing of the video in VirtualDub turned out to be the easiest part of this process. Real-time capture of 2.5 hours of video led to a 74GB Huffyuv interlaced video file. Interlaced is the tricky part.
I had to choose whether to deinterlace the video before burning to DVD. Luckily this question has already been answered in great depth on the Doom 9 forums. They say that for a DVD designed for viewing mainly of television you will retain the most detail by keeping the video interlaced. At this stage I got a little stuck. I had been planning to use Windows Live Movie Maker, a free component of Windows Live Essentials 2011. However, simply dragging the interlaced footage into the program then running the Common settings | Burn a DVD wizard produced a pretty horrible picture quality. This was not helped by the fact that the "Common settings" actually created an NTSC format DVD, with the wrong resolution and frame rate. I would have expected it to either pick up the PAL from my Windows region settings, or to ask me whether I wanted PAL or NTSC. Anyway, that wasn't the main problem. Apparently Windows Live Movie Maker can't output interlaced footage, and its attempts at deinterlacing were rather poor.
I decided to abandon Windows Live Movie Maker and switch to the highly regarded VLC. Following their How to Create a DVD guide I attempted to encode my footage in the correct interlaced form for DVD, then use Windows DVD Maker to put this onto disc. Again this produced a weird result, with moving images resulting in a rippling image. I suspect that DVD Maker deinterlaces the footage using a poor-quality deinterlacer such as blending the fields.
At this stage I decided that DVDs are bit passé. Playing my footage through VLC with real-time deinterlacing turned on resulted in a good quality picture, so I just needed to shrink my 74GB of interlaced footage into a smaller deinterlaced file. I initially tried this using VLC's conversion facility, but the deinterlace option does not work. Instead, I used VirtualDub's deinterlace filter, which produced a 122GB deinterlaced Huffyuv file. Finally I used VLC to convert this to a 2.5GB MP4 file, which fits handily onto a DVD. Although it's not an actual video DVD, there is an ever-growing number of devices which can play MP4 files. Attached to my television the PlayStation 3 and Topfield Personal Video Recorder can both play it, so for me it's an ideal format to archive to.
Finally, I should note that there are occasions when Windows Live Movie Maker is perfectly fine. I used only the tools provided by Windows 7 to convert MiniDV footage into presentable DVDs. The process was:
Finally, I should note that there are occasions when Windows Live Movie Maker is perfectly fine. I used only the tools provided by Windows 7 to convert MiniDV footage into presentable DVDs. The process was:
- attach MiniDV camera via Firewire
- the Video Import wizard pops up, which you follow to store the footage in MiniDV format on your hard disk
- add the imported footage into Windows Live Movie Maker and edit it
- run the Burn a DVD wizard