Good-bye, VHS; Hello, DVD

Our guide shows you how to turn old videotapes into digital discs. Plus: our ratings of the latest pocketable DV cameras.

By Paul Heltzel

Paul Heltzel and Chris Manners are freelance writers. Richard Baguley and Andrew Brandt are senior associate editors, Andrew Eisner is executive producer, and Alan Stafford is a senior editor for PC World.

Good-Bye, VHS; Hello, DVD.
Photograph by Marc Simon
Technology favors the new, the powerful, and the fast. So where does that leave that pile of old VHS videocassettes you have up in the attic? Fortunately, converting your old tapes to digital form allows you to edit them, add music or narration, and output them to DVD, preserving them for the future. You will have your movies in a more compact and easily stored form than VHS--and you'll be able to watch them again and again without worrying that each replay might damage your tape. And digitizing your old videos is easy.

We looked at five video capture devices that make getting your old tapes onto your PC (and then onto a DVD) simple and quick. Using software and a capture device, each of these products, which range in price from $90 to $450, imports video from your analog camcorder and copies it to your hard drive and then onto a CD or DVD. We evaluated them on all the phases of transferring video from tape to DVD: installing the device, importing the video, selecting a format, editing the video, and saving it to DVD or other media. We also provide some advice on the best way to proceed with these steps.

The dedicated capture devices are great if you have a lot of tape to convert, but there is another option. Many current digital video cameras have analog-in ports that can be used to digitize your old analog videos: Just plug your old camcorder into your DV camera's video-in port, and you can transfer your videos to digital videotape and then onto your PC. We picked five of the latest and greatest models and reviewed them: See "Digital Camcorders Reviewed."

Our hands-on tests of the dedicated capture products revealed one standout: The AVerMedia DVD EZMaker USB2.0 is the cheapest and simplest product, but it does the job of capturing video well and without fuss, so it's our Best Buy. It works only with fairly new, fast systems, though. The other product that caught our eye was the ATI All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro AGP video card, which combines video capture features with a slew of others, including the ability to turn your PC into a personal video recorder. It is expensive, but it's also a state-of-the art 3D graphics card that can deliver high frame rates in 3D games.

One interesting product that wasn't available in time for testing in this roundup was the HP DVD Movie Writer, which combines an analog capture device and a rewritable DVD drive into one unit; see our review of a preproduction unit.

We used an MPC Millennia 910i desktop with a 3.06-GHz Pentium 4 and 1GB of RAM to see how each device handled our stack of tapes. Our system had two ATA hard drives, which is an ideal configuration for video editing, as we could dedicate one drive to storing the captured video. The size of your hard disks is also important: The more free disk space you have, the more video you can capture. We'd recommend having two drives with at least 40GB each to give you enough room to store and edit your video. Our test system also had USB 2.0 ports that can transfer data much faster than the older USB 1.1 ones. All of the USB products we tried can work with USB 1.1 ports, but the quality of the video suffers, as it has to be more heavily compressed to fit into the smaller bandwidth of USB 1.1.

Alfred Hitchcock once said a good movie is worth the price of admission, the tab for the dinner, and the cost of the babysitter. Good home movies, then, should be worth the expense and effort it takes to digitize them. And you won't even need a babysitter. See, you're saving right there....

Plugging In

From left: ADS USB Instant DVD 2.0, Adaptec VideOh DVD, AVerMedia DVD EZMaker USB 2.0.Our five video editing devices vary in their interfaces, their capabilities, and their software packages. Four of them are external devices that connect to your PC via USB 2.0 ports: the $90 AVerMedia DVD EZMaker; the $150 Adaptec VideOh DVD; the $160 ADS Instant DVD; and the sleek, Porsche-designed, $165 Pinnacle Studio MovieBox USB.

The ATI All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro.
Photograph by Marc Simon
We also tried the high-end $449 ATI All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro, which is the most expensive of the group. Since it is a graphics board that plugs into the AGP slot on your motherboard, the All-In-Wonder 9800 also requires a more involved installation than the other products here. You'll have to hook up this powerhouse to one of your system's power leads (a splitter is included).

Importing Video

The ADS Instant DVD, Adaptec VideOh DVD, and Pinnacle Studio MovieBox USB devices include external breakout boxes that connect to your PC via a USB cable, making it convenient to hook up your camcorder to your PC when you want to capture video. These devices also contain chips that do the hard work of converting analog video to digital, taking some of the strain off the computer. If you're not using a very recent PC, you'll likely want to consider one of these products because video kits with hardware encoding require much less computing horsepower than their software-encoding counterparts. The AVerMedia DVD EZMaker (which relies on the PC to do the encoding) requires a 2-GHz processor or better, and Pinnacle recommends a 500-MHz processor at a minimum for its MovieBox USB.

The ADS USB Instant DVD is bundled with a program called CaptureWiz that gets high marks for smartly combining screen shots of the hardware connections and their corresponding software choices to illustrate the steps to connect your camcorder. The menus show you where to plug in an S-Video cable on the Instant DVD, for example, and which buttons to click in the software to begin capture.

All of the devices with breakout boxes capture audio as well as video through their USB connections, but the AVerMedia and ATI products send the audio signal from the camcorder to the line-in port of your PC's sound card with a provided cable. The All-In-Wonder board has proprietary cables that combine its S-Video connectors with audio into one small, round plug. One connector from the video/audio-out port must be plugged into the line-in port on your sound card.

In our subjective image quality tests, we saw very little difference between the products when capturing MPEG-2 video using the highest possible settings. The cheapest product, the AVerMedia, actually outscored all the others, but it beat out the next best, the Pinnacle, by only a hair. All the products captured good-quality video with accurate colors and smooth movement.

Captured video from your camcorder often has the tendency to be dark and oversaturated, but all of these products allow you to reduce the saturation and increase brightness while capturing. Such tweaking is much quicker during capture than afterwards, although the programs let you do this on previously captured video.

Picking a Format

Video eats amazing amounts of hard drive space, so you may be tempted to try to conserve disk space by capturing at less than the best quality setting. Think twice, though, because once you drop those bits, you can't get them back. You should import your video at a high enough bit rate that you won't have low resolution and blocky, choppy video when you create a DVD.

We encoded a video clip at the three quality settings offered by the Pinnacle Studio 8 application. For a snapshot of the results, see the table "Video: The Eyeball Test" below. The bottom line is that the lower quality settings let you fit more on your drive, but the video looks awful.

All five of these products offer preset quality options, which are typically classified by the end product you plan to create: DVD, Video CD (VCD), or Super Video CD (SVCD). If you know that your video is going straight to DVD, you'll want to stick with the quality setting for DVD, which uses MPEG-2 compression. If you capture your video in MPEG-2, you won't later have to convert it before burning a disc, a process that can take hours.

Compression Effects (chart)

Video: The Eyeball Test
Quality settings to encode video do matter, as results with Pinnacle Studio 8 show.
Pinnacle Studio 8 Quality Setting Compression
type / data
rate
Space required
for 60 minutes
of video
(gigabytes)
Quality
rating
Comments
DVD High MPEG-2/ 6000 kbps 2.74 Very good Showed smooth action and accurate colors.
SVCD Medium MPEG-2/ 2400 kbps 1.14 Good Colors looked realistic, but the video was slightly jerky.
VCD Low MPEG-1/ 1150 kbps 0.59 Poor Produced jumpy video and unrealistic-looking colors.
How We Test: We captured a video recorded on a Sony DCR-TRV318 Hi8 analog camcorder using the ATI Radeon 9800 All-In-Wonder Pro graphics card, using the three different quality settings of Pinnacle Studio 8. The videos were played back on two calibrated 21-inch NEC monitors.

Direct to DVD

If all you want is an exact copy of your tape without any edits, opt for a product that includes direct-to-disc capturing. This means the software captures the video, converts the file to DVD format, and burns it to a DVD, all automatically. Some programs (such as Sonic's MyDVD, included with Adaptec's VideOh DVD) record the video to your hard drive and then burn to a DVD-R or DVD+R disc. Others (such as Ulead's DVD MovieFactory 2, included with ADS's USB Instant DVD) can also record directly to rewritable DVDs, bypassing the hard drive. Either method handles the job without any intervention from you, so you can start the capture process and go have dinner--a definite bonus if you are planning to capture a lot of video.

The process worked surprisingly well for recording our home movies, automatically adding DVD menus and chapter points (you can choose how often to set an automatic chapter point). Ulead DVD MovieFactory 2's direct-to-disc wizard was the easiest to use, and the program can detect scenes and automatically add chapter points. Direct-to-disc encoding was, in fact, the easiest way to go from video to DVD in our testing, if you don't mind giving up creative control. You can't create sophisticated-looking DVD menus or trim the boring parts if you go direct to disc (although you can import the video into a video editing program, edit it, and then burn the edited result to DVD disc at a later date). It took about 10 minutes to capture, encode, and burn a 5-minute video clip to a DVD-R disc in MovieFactory, while the same process took 19 minutes in NeoDVD, which comes with the AVerMedia device. However, you do need a pretty powerful PC to capture the video, convert it, and then write it out to DVD in one pass. Our test system had no problem, but slower machines may not be capable of keeping up and may crash.

Making the Cut

Editing video, even on our fast test system with a gigabyte of memory, often involved waiting some time to see the final result. And during our editing runs--mostly with MPEG-2 video--we saw all of the video editing packages crash on occasion, so it makes sense to save often, or you could lose hours of work.

It's definitely worth spending some time tuning up your system before you start editing videos. Defragment your disks and make sure you have the latest drivers for your video capture device and the latest version of the capture software. You may also want to check your system and graphics board vendors' Web sites for the latest BIOS version and drivers.

Both the ATI and Pinnacle products include a version of Pinnacle's Studio 8 software, which is equally capable when capturing video, editing, adding transitions, or burning to DVD. The program's simple interface belies its deeper capabilities, such as the ability to adjust audio throughout a clip in real time, a great help for boosting dialogue or adding a background music track.

ADS's USB Instant DVD comes with Ulead's VideoStudio 7 SE, which offers both timeline and storyboard views for quickly arranging video clips and transitions into linear slots on the screen. The program offers more than 100 video transitions for moving gracefully between your video clips, and it provides 35 useful filters for improving picture quality--letting you, for example, adjust brightness or saturation using a simple slider.

Adaptec bundles ArcSoft ShowBiz with its VideOh DVD. ShowBiz is simple and user-friendly. The AVerMedia DVD EZMaker comes with the NeoDVD package, which includes Broderbund's MovieShop Select 6.5; it's a video editor that's cut from the same cloth as Ulead VideoStudio.

Getting It Write

The Pinnacle Studio MovieBox USB.
Photograph by Marc Simon
Some of these products also allow you to write your videos to videotape. This requires a video-out port, which all but the AverMedia DVD EZMaker and the Adaptec VideOh DVD have.

All the devices we looked at can write to DVD discs and support a wide range of drives. For more information on DVD burning, see "Put It on DVD."

The units here can also compress the video you capture into small files for showing on the Web or e-mailing, but ULead VideoStudio has an especially slick Share command that can in a single step generate a Web page with your video embedded as an MPEG-1 file, or attach the file directly to an e-mail message.

While the range of video editing possibilities can make your creative heart leap, you'll save rendering time and general headaches by keeping your projects no more complicated than they have to be. Just because a program comes with loads of fancy transitions and snazzy filters doesn't mean you should always use them. Filmmakers worldwide know that simple, straight cuts and less flashy effects are often the most effective and let you finish faster.

A good director begins with the end in mind. The decisions you make when you capture will greatly affect your video quality when it's time to put your production on tape or DVD. Capture at the highest quality, and any one of these products will do your VHS and 8mm tapes justice for this and future generations.

Features Comparison (chart)

Video Capture Products: Just The Facts
All of these products can take video from your old analog camcorder and convert it into a digital format ready for putting onto a DVD, but their features and prices differ greatly.
Product Street price (7/1/03) PC interface Video inputs Video outputs Audio input integrated? Bundled software Comments
Adaptec VideOh DVD
3-stars
$150 USB 2.0 Composite / S-Video None Yes Sonic MyDVD 4, ArcSoft ShowBiz Has a sharp-looking external box and hardware encoding but no analog output.
ADS Technologies USB Instant DVD 2.0
3.5-stars
$160 USB 2.0 Composite / S-Video Composite / S-Video Yes Ulead VideoStudio 7 SE, Ulead DVD MovieFactory 2, ADS CaptureWiz, MuVee AutoProducer A handy external box and wizard-driven software make capturing and outputting video simple and straightforward.
ATI All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro
4-stars
$449 AGP Composite / S-Video Composite / S-Video No1 Pinnacle Studio 8 High-end 3D graphics board has a wealth of video and TV features, but it's very expensive.
Best Buy
AVerMedia DVD EZMaker USB2.0
4-stars
$90 USB 2.0 Composite / S-Video None Yes NeoDVD Standard Digital Suite, Broderbund MovieShop Select 6.5 This small, versatile, and inexpensive capture device requires significant processing power in your computer.
Pinnacle Studio MovieBox USB
3.5-stars
$165 USB 2.0 Composite / S-Video Composite / S-Video Yes Pinnacle Studio 8 Is a straightforward and easy-to-use device that comes with a good software bundle.
Footnote:1 Uses the PC sound card to capture audio.

From Dusty Film Reels to DVD Treasures

Got a pile of 8mm home movies lying in your closet? Moving them to a digital format will make them easier to edit and share. You can either do it yourself or pay someone else to do it for you. The former is definitely the cheaper way to go, especially if you have more than a reel or two to convert. You may already have the equipment you need: a film projector, a video camera, a white wall, and not much else to do for several evenings. Just project the film onto a white wall in a dark room and videotape the projected image.

Should you decide to pay someone to do it, you'll want to do some research: Specialty photo shops, video companies, and some copy shops offer film-to-video transfer services, but most of these are small, independent operations whose costs and quality vary widely.

Before you commit to a service, ask questions: How much does it charge per foot of film? Typical costs range from 10 cents to 20 cents a foot (16 feet of super-8mm film is about 1 minute). Most services can migrate your movies to DVD, VHS, or MiniDV, but watch out for hidden costs that can add up quickly. One service I tried charged me nearly $30 for a MiniDV tape--about four times what you would pay in a retail store.

Ask how the service actually does the transfer: If it simply projects the film onto a wall, you might as well do that yourself. Others use a video camera and a projection box, while some use a special projector that has an electronic sensor instead of a lens--probably the method that produces the best quality. Regardless of the method, the safe bet is to give the service one reel and check out the results. If you're happy, send off the rest of your movies.