Before I say anything, the following post describes my goal (the title), its problems and the methods with i which i tried to achieve. This did not result in utter failure, but it also didn't end into something very successful. Ill try to document every step of my procedure as accurately as possible and will provide links of pictures that could help with understanding the situation. Thx
K, so my dad has this really old Video Camera Recorder (Sony) called HandycamVision CCD-TRV69E (for reference). So from when me and my siblings were little till when he got a much more modern digital recorder he filmed a bunch of stuff on his machine which recorded it on TAPES.
So now we got all these tapes (bout 20) each with i think 1 hr length of recordings each.
My father now wants to digitalize all these tapes. What he does: pulls out another old machine; an SEG DVCR 600 able to transcribe data on said tapes to a re-writable disc.
(btw here is a pic of both the manuals for the two devices:
)
Seems easy enough; you just simply plug in the recorder to the DVCR play the tape and press record on the DVCR which basically records your recording onto the CD.
K. Now it gets a little strange. My dad now gives me the CD's and asks me to copy them onto the computer. OK put the CD in and open the file, two options pop up
1. Files currently on disc
VIDEO_RM
2. Files waiting to be written on disc
VIDEO_TS
k now i don't know why, but under the first option there are just a bunch of unrecognizable files (which is strange cuz why wouldn't the video files "currently" be on the disc?). Under the second one, this pops up
http://i.imgur.com/PYaOa9O.pngAlright so two things you might notice right away
1. There are five video files instead of one (i previously said each tape was 1 hour long)
2. The video format is VOB (never heard or seen of it before, figured it was some old format)
Alright so I go through this process a few times, and every single time i get the same result: 1 hour tape translates into 5 VOB files. So this isn't even the real strange part, but before I talk about that I'm just gonna say that after converting these files to a more accessible format (using an external program) i found out each one of the bigger files (1 GB) corresponded to about 14:30 min of video and the smaller ones to about 5 min (give or take).
Alright so now the strange part:
Before i converted any of these files to a format I was familiar with i tried seeing what opening the VOB ones would do
Very strangely, every single one i clicked (even the smaller file), even though they all corresponded to different segments of the tape, showed this screen
http://i.imgur.com/igQnETv.pngDon't ask me why or how cuz i have no idea how this is possible, especially cuz i don't know where the 5th video thumbnail is.
alright so after clicking on every thumbnail i noticed
1. they are all varying lengths (different for every thumbnail on every CD)
2. the thumbnails correspond to different filming sessions; not like based on an hourly basis but on an unknown amount of time (for example the last clip is all about our trip to Peru, the second one is centered around Christmas, and so on and so forth)
Now being that part of my goal is to be able to edit these files i need to have them available and compatible to put in a program and this format does not work.
So i did a little search on Google "convert VOB into AVI" and oh! how convenient a small little program going exactly by that name
(here's a pic of the interface of the program:
http://i.imgur.com/ZCvLmC3.png)
I download it run it and convert a couple CD's worth of files. In this case; the outcome is (like i said earlier) 5 files with a respectable length of 14:30 min and 5 min just abouts. (unlike how in that strange menu page each thumbnail corresponded to whole segments of film in a certain amount of time meaning that here after 14:30 min it would just cut and you had to move to the next file)
So i say to myself well that's not too bad, but i notice something that is: quality drop is enormous!
here's and example of 3 "big" files and one small one
http://i.imgur.com/dbmhC0X.pngyou'll notice the difference of size (almost a fourth of the original!)
I thought it was the AVI format i had selected (mp4) and/or the settings (on the right side(see pic
http://i.imgur.com/ZCvLmC3.png)) but found it wasn't the case after trying several different formats (same result, unfamiliar with most of the other formats and settings) with no avail.
So here i am trying to figure out what to do. I've found programs don't tend to like mp4 format but i don't wanna reconvert everything if i can avoid it. I've also found that most of the time the sound is off but I'm sure that can easily be corrected through editing which i haven't really dedicated any time to
So my question now is: is there anything I did wrong or need to do different, and what are your suggestions?
Thank you for your time
