Originally posted by: AndysRevenge
Well as they say time is money. However seeing as how im capturing my familys memories and not some action flick, I think ill opt for the best quality availible. This brings up another question. What is the acuall difference between best quality and good quality, and will I even notice this? Will the "best" quality even matter when converting analog to digital? What about digital to digital?
While it is possible to capture in an uncompressed format with some products and not others -- it's unlikely you're going to capture much in uncompressed 640x480 AVI.
The bitrate on 640x480, 30FPS, 24-bit color video is:
640 * 480 * 24 / 8 * 30 =
27,648,000 bytes (26.4 MB) per *second*. That's 1,658,880,000 bytes (1582 MB) per minute, and 99,532,800,000 bytes (94,921 MB = 93 GB) per hour. You might be able to capture at those settings, but you're certainly going to have to compress it for any kind of distribution -- and if you want to burn DVD discs that normal players can play, you have to compress to <=9Mbps MPEG2 (~4GB/hour) anyway. Frankly, I don't see any difference between ~15-20Mbps MPEG2 and uncompressed video, and even the differences between ~9Mbps MPEG2 (similar to a well-mastered superbit DVD) and uncompressed video are pretty subtle for most 480i material.
What interface should I opt for?
USB2.0 and Firewire are pretty equivalent, in terms of external boxes (USB1 is too slow for capture at decent bitrates). For an internal capture card, I think PCI is pretty much your only choice right now.
Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I should have been. Surely the analog tape I plan to record doesn't even come close to digital quality? Therefore I would not "have" to have the best quality in order to record it at the best quality possible for the conversion? Or does it not work like that?
Yes, it works pretty much like that. VHS tape is a pretty crummy source most of the time; at a very high bitrate (or with an uncompressed format), most of your bandwidth is going to just be displaying the same pixels multiple times.