SGI: Video

Hello,

I'm planning to digitalize some old VHS tapes, and I'm looking for the cheapest way to do it. In my computer "stock", I have the following items:

Octane R14k 600Mhz, V6, 2048 MB RAM, 73GB HD0, 18GB HD1, 73GB HD2

O2 195MHz (IIRC it has not a lot of RAM, and nothing related to video)

Indigo2 (don't remember either, since it hasn't been fire up since a long time)

Mac Pro 2x2.8GHz Quad-Xeon, 2GB RAM

Standard old PC

What do you think I need to be able to transfer my old VHS movies to something viewable on a DVD ?

Thanks in advance for any advise !

PB

Mac Pro with El gato EyeTV 250 Plus. $110 for a refurb from Other World Computing. Got one a few weeks ago and its like new, original package and all accessories and software. I still don't have cable in the room with the iMac but I wanted to test it out. The day I got it I tried to capture from a VHS, thinking it was going to look like crap until I played with settings on the VCR and in the EyeTV. Nope! I raised the brightness a bit and it looked really good. Did a 45 minute uncompressed capture before running into a problem with the tape. Has hardware MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoding or you can capture uncompressed using the game mode - meant to prevent delay and used for connecting game consoles through the EyeTV.

There is no SGI solution that's as easy and no where near as cheap. Plus you get an HDTV tuner and the great EyeTV 3 software to capture from over the air HDTV or cable. You'd probably edit on your Mac anyway right?

I think Flame 2009 could make the job.
Sorry for this bad joke

QuicksilverG4 wrote: There is no SGI solution that's as easy and no where near as cheap.

Well, I've bought the A/V modules for that O2 for $15, so you could do it on the SGI, but the "easy" part would be a matter of opinion. (And the A/V module is supposed to be pretty sensitive to the tape quality). The Mac is a better solution just from the availability of more modern software tools. But if you like a retro feel....

Hello,
Thanks for your replies!
PB

QuicksilverG4 wrote: There is no SGI solution that's as easy and no where near as cheap.

That's very true. Doing it with SGIs is just more interesting and a bit of a challenge, which is why I'm doing it that way,
using a combination of O2/Octane with video options, though I don't need to use any professional apps. However,
I'll be using a PC for doing the final format conversion, probably buying an i7 920 system in May/June.

Can't give specific details yet though, not had time to build the final setup and do proper tests. Done early tests
which worked ok, capturing with O2, converting to uncompressed AVI and then to DivX using a PC, but the available
sw and codecs have improved since then. The one thing I have done is buy the commercial verison of DivX.

pub_bronx, the AV board for O2 is cheap, and the digvid board for O2 isn't too bad either really given the much higher
cost of the equivalent option for Octane, etc. Software is an entirely different issue though and for many is often the
main stickler with using SGIs. In theory your position ought to be the same as mine, ie. only really need cut & paste, so
the supplied tools ought to suffice. I've yet to explore Premiere but it runs ok on O2.

I've been acumulating 300GB disks for my setup, have 9 of them now. Just need some spare time. *sigh*

Ian.

eMGee wrote: From what I can tell, for regular VHS, that you'd need something like a DMediaPro DM6 (for SD, more shouldn't be needed for this specific task at least) with optional DM5 /VBOB plus a VTR (not to mention cables) and either a VTR that is merely VHS/SD, yet with SDI I/O, or something to feed the VHS/SD into the board/VBOB somehow.

For VHS, that's overkill. One can capture VHS just fine using an O2 or Cosmo2 Indy/Indigo2/Octane. Likewise, for anything digital that
does not need HD, an O2 with digvid works fine. I've been testing an O2 today with Illusion and it captures real-time D1 PAL no problem,
and playback is ok too. Editing is probably best done by moving the data to an Octane2/Fuel/Tezro though, as even a single-CPU R12K/400
is so much faster at (for example) exporting a clip as Targa files than a typical R5K/300 O2 (yes, there are faster O2s, but even an R5K/300 O2
is more expensive than an R12K/400 Octane). Come to think of it, an Octane with the older DIGVID is not that costly now; for digital SD
work it would be better than O2 by far.

I hadn't considered using Illusion before, but now I know it works ok I will probably use it instead of MovieMaker for editing. As for capture,
O2 with analogue AV and dmrecord works fine, though for tapes with degraded quality it is better to use Indigo2 with IMPACT Compression
or Octane with Octane Compression (I have both) since Cosmo2 is better at coping with noisy signals than O2's VICE hardware.

Even including the cost of a decent PC for final format conversion, having an O2/Octane/Fuel with the relevant lesser but perfectly ok options
would be much cheaper than anything that requires a DM5/VBOB.

For reference, I have about 300 tapes to digitise, so this is a key area of study for me.

Ian.

Does anybody have any experience with the Miranda mini converters, e.g. SDI <-> composite or SDI <-> component? I guess I should avoid composite. SDI <-> AVC would be awesome, but probably expensive.

I've got SDI I/O on a couple of systems, but no decks, players or monitor that can handle it. But I have SDI I/O on the old 4D/380VGX Predator rack these days. It has a VideoLab with 601 (parallel) video I/O and I added some Miranda parallel <-> serial converters to that. A PowerSeries with SDI video, how cool is that

jan-jaap writes:
> Does anybody have any experience with the Miranda mini converters, e.g. SDI <-> composite or SDI <-> component? ...

I've never been able to find one, at least not at a useful price.


> ... A PowerSeries with SDI video, how cool is that

Nice!! I have a VideoCreator unit, but until I get my Crimson working it's going nowhere.

Ian.