Its going great. My first goal is to transfer all my recoded episodes of the short-lived live action series
"The Tick" to DVD. Anyone remember that show on Fox a few years back staring Patrick Warburton? There were only 8 episodes before it was cancelled. I have all 8 on VHS.
So far I have two episodes recorded in DV format (i.e on my computer). I still need to go through and edit such as cutting out the commercials, and running video filters to clean the images. Then encode the movies. I have come into a storage problem though and have ordered another hard drive to compensate. DVD quality video takes about 200 MB/minute of disk space before you encode it.
I am still in the learning phases right now. But I am becoming better. The process is much more complex and time consuming then I imagined. It take about 2 days (around 8 man-hours) to author and create a disk from the moment you start recording til you have the finished product. Most of it is waiting for your computer though (as I said, these are HUGE files), so you can grab a bite to eat or whatever.
So far I have made the following creations...
Video CDs:
- A commercial my company produced for a road show (it was a computer file I transferred to a video CD)
- A pair of music videos with a simple text only menu selection
- A copy of one of my favorite Saturday Night Live sketches I recorded from TV
DVDs:
- Transferred a movie I bought on VHS, compete with scene selection menu. A DVD version has not been produced so I had to make my own.
- A sample disk to test which encoding programs did the best job before I bought the full versions. Its the same scene encoded 7 different ways.
As for the cost, I went with low-end professional quality products so there are cheaper routes, but it was as follows.
DV-100 converter $260
DVD burner $220
Firewire card $30
3' High-quality video cable $8
Software $120
2 DVD-RW $13
10 DVD-R $18
Except for the DVD burner (I wish I got a DVD+RW instead of a DVD-RW because media is more readily available) I am happy with the purchases. The great part is that the re-writable DVDs are playable in set top DVD players. So, you can create a disk, fine tune it, write again, and repeat until its just right. Then you burn your final version to a write-once disk. That saves a lot of money since disks are expensive.
If anyone else is thinking about picking this up as a hobby, its very fun. You don't need to spend as much as I did either. If you don't need 2 hours per disk and are happy with about 40 minutes per disk (and a little loss of quality), you can burn to normal CD-Rs that play in set top DVD players. Thus you skip a large chunk of what I paid for. And you can get a cheeper converter as well. In fact, if you have a digital video camera (not a web cam though) most models will convert for you and you won't need to buy that either.
I hope to have all my VHS videos on DVD or CD within a few months (there are a lot).
