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Digitalise your old analog movies
The following instructions are base on my personal experience using Pinnacle PCTV 50E as digitalizing devices and opensource software. There are however numerous other tools and applications some of which might produce better results than these.
Table of Contents- Generalities about digitalising videos
- Capturing the movie
- Editing and saving the movie
- Problems with the format
- Useful Links
Generalities
The final quality of your digitalisation will depend on the hardware as well as the software that you use. But in any case you will suffer a serious loss of quality. I therefore recommend doing this only if the content of your original is really worth the time investment that you are making since it might take the same time to re-film your content with a modern digital camera in clear and unfussy images. You might also want to avoid doing this on a labtop since those are not really prepared for the heavy data crunching that a digitalisation demands of your central processing Unit!
The choice of software was rather limited to either opensource or one coming installed with your PC. You might get better results with commercial tools.
Capturing the movie
1. Connecting a source
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Connect your video source - be it a camera or a recorder - to the digitalising hardware, in this case the PCTV 50 as described in its handbook.
One of the double cinch plugs connect to the entry marked with a film icon on the box, the other connects to the sound entry of the box and I needed a special connector to pass from cinch to jack (see left entry in illustration)! If your source has a S-Video exit connect by S-video cable for better quality! |
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2. Connecting device to computer
| Connect the digitalising device to your computer with a UBS cable. |
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3. Choosing the settings for the capture
- Start Pinnacle Media Centers Assistant (or Windows MovieMaker).
- Select "Capture".
- Decide settings.
4. Start recording
- Start Pinnacle Media Center (or use the capture function in Windows MovieMaker).
- Select "Video".
- Select "Record".
- Select "Composite PCTV.
- Select "Record now".
- Supervise capture and end recording as desired with "Stop recording".
Note 1: This will produce a video in the AVI-format which is 25% of the size it would take to get the video in the MPEG2 format that you could get if you change the capturing settings from DivX to mpeg.
Note 2: The AVI-format has the added advantage to be accepted by Windows Movie Maker, which allows you to rapidly produce a simple movie providing primitive editing capabilities and possibilities for adding titles, transitions and video effects.
Editing and saving the movie
Choosing Windows Movie Maker has the advantage of it being for free and already installed on your machine. Providing only very limited tools for your handling of your raw material has the added advantage of reducing the time you will spend. The main drawbacks are obvious: nothing especially fancy can be down. But there is also another one. The tool is instable and it does not tolerate parallel input. You will several times loose your invested time when it freezes since the save-function does not work properly. By any means avoid clicking something, while a process is still running! Always do one action after the other!
1. Cutting the raw material
- Start MovieMaker.
- Select "Import Video". Browse for the avi file and import. MovieMaker will split your raw material into short scenes, based on its analysis of the content.
- Select the first clip and wait for it to appear in the display window on the right side.
- Run the clip and cut it with the Cut-button below the display window to the desired length.
- Draw the resulting clip below into the timeline (or the storyboard, if you prefer that view).
- Repeat this action with the other clips placing each clip into the timeline at the desired place.
- Chose a transitions, special effects, titles, credits, background music, or narration that you might want to add and place it into the timeline.
- Choose the desired quality and save your product onto the hard disk.
Problems with the format
Depending on the way you captured your movie it will turn out in the format of avi, mpeg or some thing else. Pinnacles other format is mpeg. But there are different types of mpegs. Pinnacle turns out a mpeg2. This format is not accepted by all editing software - certainly not with MovieMaker - which forces you to convert your raw material and certainly incur quality loss in the transformation process.
Conversion and other tools
- G-Spot is an application that will help you find out which format your video comes in and which CODEC is used.
- Mediacoder converts to and from many audio and video compression or container formats .
- DVDx converts between different formats and standards, AVI, WMV, DVD to VCD, SVCD, DivX and allows you to cut off large unwanted chunks in the process.
- VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility and can trim and clean up video before exporting to tape or processing with another program.
Useful Links
- How to use MovieMaker. A clear how-to with didactical movies from Microsoft.
- Displaying Movies in Vista. Comprehensive HOWTO on our site about doing movies in Vista
- The Desk Top Video Handbook On Line v. 15.0. This well organized handbook has a lot of info about the latest video capture cards, digital video editing software, video storage solutions, and digital video.
- Desktop Videos. Comprehensive Site for Desktop Video Creators.
- Digital Video Editing. About the basics of digital video editing and production using Apple's iMovie and Final Cut Pro 3.
- Embedding Movies with Flash. This page presents the basics of Flash and the FlashSound JavaScript API used to embed Movies.
- Switch offers a streaming facility called "Play"(initially) on a trial basis. This is for free to all the members of the Swiss academic institutions. More details.