What is good format to save VHS Tape VOB files?

Rich Parry wrote on 1/21/2012, 6:20 PM

I have moved 30+ years of family videos from VHS to DVD and moved the VOB files to Vegas for editing. These are all family videos that are often 10 minutes long with only 10 seconds worth keeping. I plan to review many hours of video and save only the small portions worth keeping.

I am planning on saving the small segments as AVI files. Considering the poor quality of the 1980s videos, saving as uncompressed AVI files seems overkill resulting in unnecessarily huge files. Yes I know disk space is cheap, but I’d still wonder if there is a better codec to use to save the subclips.

Thanks in advance,
Rich

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 1/21/2012, 6:28 PM

DV-AVI will preserve the full brilliance of the reds in your original VHS tapes.
Being sarcastic, of course, but it shouldn't hurt any.

GenJerDan wrote on 1/21/2012, 6:32 PM

The VOBs should be MPEG-2. WIll Vegas recompress or otherwise mess with them if they're cuts-only at this point if you re-save them as MPEG-2?

johnmeyer wrote on 1/21/2012, 7:04 PM

Editing VOB in Vegas is generally not a good idea. It will be almost impossible to get Vegas to edit without recompressing the results. Also, if whatever device you used to generate the VOB files did the usual thing of creating 1 GB files and then starting a new file, you may find that Vegas chokes a little at the point where the files join. Usually you will see a slight video glitch and also may lose the audio for about 1/2 a second. There are ways around this that I have documented, at length, in these forums. They are long posts and I won't re-create them here.

If you follow one or more of the suggestions I make in those other posts, you can actually do your edits, and then export an EDL in a format that Womble will understand. Then, you let Womble do the actual cuts. It is quite capable of editing MPEG-2 (including VOB files) without introducing any loss or change whatsoever (except a few frames around the cut points).

PeterDuke wrote on 1/21/2012, 8:50 PM

Using Windows Explorer (not Vegas Explorer) drag the main info file of your DVD (e.g. VTS_01_0.IFO) to the Vegas timeline. In due course the whole video should appear. Trim as required. DV AVI should be a good format in which to save your results (about 13 GB per hour).