• Adobe Premiere Pro

  Live encoding for digitizing VHS

  Posted by Doug Burnett on September 3, 2013 at 6:33 pm

  I haven’t digitized analog for years but I’m planning to finally start digitizing my old VHS tapes. I already have the hardware. I used to just use Adobe Premier to capture but realized I’m gonna have to manually encode and export each clip, which would take days with all the VHS tapes I have.

  What tool can I use to just plain digitize my VHS straight to H264 with no other effort needed?

  Jeff Pulera replied 12 years, 3 months ago 3 Members · 6 Replies
• 6 Replies

• 

  Jeff Pulera

  September 3, 2013 at 8:28 pm

  Hi Doug,

  The more info you can provide, the better quality of responses you’ll get. Mac or PC, and what “hardware” do you currently have for capturing from VHS?

  There are low-cost (consumer) capture units that will go direct to H.264. I use the Matrox MXO2 Mini Max that can capture SD or HD direct to H.264 files using hardware encoding in the box. Even does hardware scaling – I’ll capture DV via S-video and convert to “H.264 Blu-ray” in a 1080i format.

  Thanks

  Jeff Pulera
  Safe Harbor Computers
• 

  Doug Burnett

  September 4, 2013 at 5:40 pm

  Hi Jeff. Thanks for the response. I’m on a Mac 10.7 using a simple component-to-USB converter (https://goo.gl/zD0YRE). Was trying to do it cheap. Is there software that can convert live?
• 

  Jeff Pulera

  September 4, 2013 at 6:00 pm

  Hi Doug,

  Cheap is right, looks like your capture device of choice is $8.86?!

  Appears that it perhaps captures direct to MPEG-2 for writing to DVDs. But you want to capture straight to H.264? Not a Mac user, but even on the PC I don’t know what software would encode straight to H.264 from a cheapo input device, sorry

  Jeff Pulera
  Safe Harbor Computers
• 

  Doug Burnett

  September 6, 2013 at 4:35 pm

  Yah, it was a dud 🙂 That’s what I get for being cheap. I did find this one which does go straight to H264, is made for Mac, and has good reviews.
  https://www.elgato.com/video/video-capture

  Thanks for the advice.
• 

  Eric Balboa

  January 26, 2014 at 1:40 pm

  Hi Jeff,

  I’m capturing vhs via the Canopus advc 300 in the dv codec. Each 2-3 hour tape needs to go on it’s own blue ray disc. Would you recommend transcoding to Mpeg2 blu ray or h264 blu ray in 1080i?

  I’ve done a couple with the Mpeg2 setting at “high quality” and the file size is rather small as the default bitrate is only at about 5.

  Should I stick with Mpeg2 and manually bump the bitrate up to 10 or even 15, or should I just use h264 1080i?

  Thanks for your help.
• 

  Jeff Pulera

  January 27, 2014 at 2:43 pm

  Hi Eric,

  Though I’ve never actually done it, you’re supposed to be able to put DVD material on a Blu-ray disc. I would not bother with upconverting the material to 1080i first – the Blu-ray player will do the upconvert for you upon playback using quality hardware methods, and this should work better than doing it in software.

  Just encode for “MPEG-2 DVD” with a CBR 8.0 bitrate setting.

  Hope this works out for, I’ve not tested it but have seen many forum posts about putting DVD files on Blu-ray.

  Thanks

  Jeff Pulera
  Safe Harbor Computers

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