Creating Playable Music, Picture, Video Disks of Family Reunion.

I think I am beginning to see a problem, if my cousin's video recorder doesn't have a way to convert her video to DV, that part of the project will have to be put on hold for a while.

I'll know more when I talk to her Saturday.

How was your cousin's video recorded and what is the file format.

whs said:

How was your cousin's video recorded and what is the file format.

That will be the question I will ask her when I talk to her on Saturday.
I should know by 5pm est.

Hi whs good evening,

I talked with my cousin, and the video I was worried about is a moot point. She has a Cannon ES8100V 8mm and will be taking the tape to Costco's Photo Center to have the analog video (AV) converted to Digital Video (DV) and burned to disk, then upload them to an account she has with Snapfish(SF).

I was concerned about the cost, but she has done this before and doesn't think it will be that bad, maybe around $20US. All I know is I have heard it is expensive and thought it would be much more than that.
It says this at the Photo Center link under product details, I underlined two areas:

• Pricing starts at $17.99. A 2nd DVD copy is included with every transfer order.
• Just bring your reels, tapes and slides to Costco 1-Hour Photo. Pick up your DVDs in about 3 weeks.

It's nice she will get a copy, but we'll see.


There is 25" of video and I told her to expect two disks. I was reading where 14GB equals about an hour of running time, so, turning that around and rounding the 25" to 30 I figured 7GB and two DVD disks.

I have already downloaded her pictures. The only thing I dislike is SF only allows a 10MB zipped download, I don't mind the .zip part, but do on the size limit.

I'll be online for a while yet, but it's getting late here so I think I'll call it a night and start on them tomorrow.

Well, that seems to solve that problem. I convert my VHDs myself. Quality usually suffers, but maybe Costco can do a better job. I have a great variety in output size per minute - from 20MB/min to 50MB/min. No idea why because all those videos were taken with the same camera.

Do you use something like this? Dazzle Video Creator Platinum HD I've seen it on amazon from $219.00 new to $80/85 used, but a lot of people are dissatisfied with it; poor quality, skips/drops, sound suffers, and non-existent support.

Not sure about your varying DV output, maybe it is your converter. If I come across anything I'll let you know.

I used the gear and a program from this company. I think I paid appr. $60 for it. The quality is OK and I have no skips or sound problems. But when played on TV, it is not the same as the original VCR. But fortunately there are ways to improve it a bit with the PC.

You probably already know about this, it's about 8mm, but if you scroll down a bit in the first answer you'll see it below the Some points to keep in mind for better quality DVD's: section:

- If you transfer two hours of VHS to a DVD it can result in a significant loss of quality unless you have a high quality MPEG-2 encoder or use methods that encode the video at "half resolution." The normal DVD video resolution is 720x480 for NTSC, but some encoders and DVD authoring programs allow you to use 352x480 resolution. When you convert VHS to DVD this smaller resolution can still deliver very good results at the low data rates (bitrates) required to fit two or more hours of video on one DVD, especially if you use an analog-to-MPEG2 encoder or a standalone VHS to DVD recorder that bypasses the analog-to-DV step.
- Try to use compressed audio on your DVD's. Uncompressed - PCM - audio takes up a lot of space on the DVD that could better be used for higher-quality video. Dolby Digital/AC3 is the best choice for audio compression.

Source: I have many 8mm camcorder tapes that I want to convert to DVD. Is there a conversion kit available that I can buy?

Thanks for the info.

Your welcome, well its past midnight for me, and I'm heading for bed. I'll catch up tomorrow, good night.