Capturing Hi8 & 8 tapes - help!

DublinWriter

I've attached my old Sony camcorder to the PC via Firewire and I'm in the process of capturing all my old 'home movies'.

The video captured is interlaced, which is fine for TV etc, but looks like crap on the PC as I get lots of jaggies when there's fast motion going on.

a) What program would you recommend to covert the raw DV AVI clips to non-interlaced DivX/Xvid? (i.e. something I could watch on a PC monitor).

b) What program would you recommend to create DVDs? I've tried Pro Show Gold (great for pics) but it seems to be doing a lot of rendering of the captured files - surely if you're making a DVD then it wouldn't have to recode the existing footage as it's in the same native resolution as DVDs (752 by whatever it is).

SouperComputer

To be honest, I dont think Id go the route of converting the video to DiVX or what not perse. Really you should get your mits on some video editing software. Sony Vegas is my fav on the PC. Then from here, edit your video and you can export it to MPEG4, WMV or whatever format for storage and MPEG2 to import into your chosen DVD authoring software.

DV footage has to be rerendered for DVD. They are both MPEG2 and the same res, but thats where the similarities end. Generally the workflow would be to edit the video down to the clips you want to use with video editing software, render it to DVD compliant MPEG2, then use DVD authoring tool to create your menus and chapters.

Your source on Hi8/Video8 is interlaced, you have more flexibilty with how you want to deinterlace the "destination" file if the source is captured natively, hence why the raw video you see is interlaced.

Amalgam

Handbrake works fine for what you want to do.

(safe and free)

http://handbrake.fr/

I dump DV footage from a Panasonic and just encode etc.. it will de-interlace for you.

Amalgam

Some pointers for open source\freeware at this site:

http://lifehacker.com/316478/top-10-free-video-rippers-encoders-and-converters

I would also encourage you to lurk at these websites:

(shallow end..)

http://www.videohelp.com/

(in at the deep end..)

http://forum.doom9.org/

DublinWriter

Thanks souper and amalgam.

I've used Adobe Premier since V.1 in 1994, so I'm ok using that.

The main problem I have is deinterlacing when going DV to MPEG2. A lot of the tapes are family vids, etc, and I don't think I want to go as lossy as MPEG4/DivX/Xvid - the sources aren't the best quality so I'm getting a lot of macro blocking with the latter codecs.

I've started to play around with Virtuadub, and it's a pretty comprehensive piece of software. The real-time preview mode when converting is really useful.

There's about 5 different filters available for it for de-interlacing - initially I thought interlacing was pretty straightforward, but on reading up on it you can have different type of field interpolations and even colour-based interlacing going on. There's dozens of parameters in all of the deinterlacing filters.

At the end of the day I might just keep the original sources in DV format as well as encoding them to MPEG2.

Handbreak looks interesting. Thanks again for the help.