Having scanned my slides and negatives to CD-r, I fancy doing the same with my analogue camcorder footage. Anyone had experience of this?

Seen the Adaptec "Videoh" package advertised for c.£60 which would seem to do the trick, but it seems that you get no better quality than VHS unless you have a DVD-r due to CD-r limited storage capacity.

Also worried about the speed of transfer as the CD-r package seems doesnt seem to be compatible with USB2

I posted a few links that may be useful some time ago. (see bottom of this reply).

Basically what you do depends what your DVD player will play. Most play something called VCD which, at its best is about as good as VHS - you lose the smudgyness and smear of VHS but gain some digital atrifacts like blockiness and shimmer etc. You can get about 1hour on a single CD. If your DVD will play SVCD then this is about half way between VCD and DVD, but will only fit about 30mins on one CD. Note that SVCD is much less universal, so it may play fine on your DVD and not on another player. DV writers are only £100 now, so if you really do want the best quality archive then it may be worth investing in one of these.

The hard bit is getting the analogue video into your pc. You can use a tv cpature card and plug into the composite or SVHS input - but I've had real hassles with the sound and vid drifting out of sync. It's fine for a few minutes, but there's no way I could dump a 30minute tape in one go. The most elegant alternative is to use a hardware encoder (I think Dazzle do one called a DV bridge - analogue vid&sound in and firewire digi vid out). Alternatively my brother has a sony DV camcorder that has an SVSH in and firewire out which does the same job. Then both sound and vid arrive digitally in sync into your pc.

Finally remember that digital vid is a real PC eater - a 5 min AVI video file is 1GB, Encoding half an hour of digi vid to VCD in TMP took my PC over night (2G Athlon).


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