Anyone recommend some render settings for 8mm

dornier wrote on 12/11/2006, 3:32 PM
Does anyone have any "usual" starting points to render 8mm home movies that are sitting uncompressed as AVI?

I've got 4 of them that by using VBR are coming out to 1.5gb each. I'm running out of disc space and need to get that down considerably.

The films are 30+ years old, so I don't want to lose too much in the transfer, especially since I've washed them up fairly well.

Any help out there would be great.

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 12/11/2006, 4:29 PM
What about a dual layer disc?

JJK
RBartlett wrote on 12/11/2006, 4:33 PM
A lot depends on who is getting these films next.

If you've had them worked into uncompressed AVI, then it may pay to keep them in this format for archival purposes. Putting them out to at least a 2nd copy hard disc - then to start a program of imaging this archive onto a new drive every 3-5 years, keeping two at any one time - ideally at different locations.

As for a delivery format, as said - whatever you can fit them onto with the least amount of compression (but at the same time, not too little so that you can still play them in consumer equipment). Given that they are not likely to be interlaced in their uncompressed format - you can probably do very well with circa 6Mbps CBR with MPEG-2 SD.

Are there any other purposes that you need to consider? Will you be editing in Vegas or essentially transcoding/converting?
ECB wrote on 12/11/2006, 5:45 PM
Dornier,

I assume the 'rendering' you are referring to is mpeg2. I have captured many k feet of 8mm, dating back 66 years, super 8mm silent & sound with the MovieStuff WorkPrinter XP. I did not have the option to capture uncompressed video only DV. The quality of the captured image was great. You can search this forum for the optimum settings. I have mpeg2 rendered the captured DV video to mpeg2 using VBR 6000 average 8000 max and 1/2 D1 (352 x 480) VBR 3300 average 4200 max. When I compared the results I could not 'see' the difference between the full D1 and the 1/2 D1 mpge2 files. The 1/2 D1 file size is reduced by ~1/2 of the full D1 file size.

Ed B
farss wrote on 12/11/2006, 6:14 PM
A single layer DVD-ROM can hold roughly 20 minutes of DV as an AVI file. Split and then copy the files onto MAM-E or MAM-A gold DVDs, these will outlive most of us.

If it was worth the effort to transfer the material a few dollars to save it for posterity would seem a trivial impost.

Bob.
dornier wrote on 12/16/2006, 10:26 AM
I've reduced the screen size down a little. They were grainy 8mm's to begin with so blowing them up on a 36" tv won't look that great anyway.

I'm running a test at VBR using a max =6 ave=5 min=192.

Three of the five files are about 38 minutes each. Right now at max=8 and ave=6 they're about 1.3 to 1.6 gb.

I may not have explained myself earlier, but I've already had them transferred from film to AVI by a local film house. They're stored on 9 DVD discs for now and backed up on my network.


I just need these 5 files to fit on a single DVD with a little room to spare for a few other items. Like most things here, it's a tradeoff of size versus quality.