Encoding station is back up and running
 

I had a box full of old Beta and VHS tapes dropped off that had a bunch of old football games on them. My friend is a nut case when it comes to this stuff. I think I did well over 200 tapes a year or so ago.

Captured and encoded all that stuff took a huge amount of time.

I will have to redig out the spec's for the computer, but the heart of it is a Canopus Capture card that does really nice captures. The problem with it is it will only work on a Win XP non updated machine. As soon as you update it the card stops working as its a older card.

So this is a Pentium 4 something or another LOL.

The tape machines are
Beta Deck - Sony SL2710
VHS Deck - JVC HR-S9911U
DVD Deck - Panasonic DMR-E20

So capture with the Canopus card and dumpp to a file. I use Sonic Foundry Video le 3.0 to do the actual capture.
Edited with TMPG MPGEditor which works very nice for this kind of stuff.
Encoded with TMPG Express
Then burt to disk with TMPG DVD Author

Nice thing about TMPG software is its easy to use and can take advantage of multi core setups so I will most likely transfer the edited files over to my main rig and encoded on the 965XE.

I did a test awhile ago on the speed differance vs the Pentium 4. Back then I would caputure maybe 3 full VHS tapes, edit to split things up and then encoded which would take almost a full week. One of the same files took only 30 minutes on the QX9770 so it should be much faster on the 965XE and SSD Raid.

The video encoding station lives on :)

Nice Bill

TMPGExpress also supports GPU accelerated encoding IIRC.

Altohugh personally I have never had any success with GPU encoding on either nVidia or ATi... the best program I found (one that did not make shit poor encodes anyway) Was some 3,000 dolalr software I um "tried out" and my AMD 920 did it faster :S

BUT... maybe they made some improvements.. Might be worth 15 minutes of time to try it out.

Yeah I might check that out, thanks :)

When I first started doing this I took out a lot of double comercials and stuff like that during a game, TMPG makes that extremely easy to do.

I am going to have to use that KV switch I had up for sale so I can run teh bench at the same time.

All in all I am not trying to do studio quality stuff as some of these tapes go back to the 60's so quailty of the tapes are not that great in some cases.

The next step I have been working on him about doing is taking all these DVD's I have made and converting to media files and place all that stuff on a server for ease of use.

First Beta Tape captured and encoded.

Length of game... Super Bowl XXIV - 49ers vs Broncos 1/28/90 - 4 hours 12 minutes

Checked encode time on Pentium 4 machine - over 10 hours
Transfered the 58gb size file to main rig and encoded on 965XE @ 4.0ghz with all 8 threads flying - 23 minutes per DVD LOL :)

This will be 2 DVD's so in the end I have saved a freaking lot of time.

KVM switch is setup so I can capture and bench at the same time now :)