Reader How Tos: A System To Convert VHS and 8 mm Tape To DVD – THG.RU

Introduction

This article is unusual in so far as it is by one of Tom’s Hardware Guide’s readers. It’s a little experiment on our part to see if it is possible to include reader’s experiences on the site. So, put your money where your mouth is. If you have a desire to write your own DIY story then drop me a line with a very brief pitch on what you want to write about. You never know, just like Jim Tomlinson, you might get published. Send your pitches to omid@tomshardware.com. I won’t reply to everyone so, don’t take it personally. I won’t read long, rambling emails either. Short, sharp, and interesting. That’s the first step to get by my initial filter.

Decision to Buy a New Computer

On July 9, I decided to buy a new computer to convert my many hours of aging 8MM and VHS tapes into DVD videos. I believed the state of the art had advanced to the point that personal computer technology could make reasonable (watchable) digital videos captured from analog video sources. But, many questions arose in my mind.

Should I Buy a Complete System or Bit-piece?

For the last couple of years I had been a fan of Dell computer systems, for both work and home. It had been seven years since I had assembled my last computer from the ground up. Dell made it so easy (and cheap!) to buy a computer system, already assembled, with the software installed, ready to plug in and use (after some minor configuration). And they gave terrific phone support! So I looked at buying a Dell system, and looked hard. But the closer I looked, the more I wondered if I couldn’t do better if I bought it bit-piece.

Here is what I knew when I first started: I wanted a fast system to process all the analog video I had and store it on hard disk in digital video form. I then wanted to edit the digital video, shuffle video scenes around, and make my own movies. Finally, I wanted the option of making a DVD movie disc or a CD/ DVD data disc. These requirements dictated a processor with a fast front side bus (FSB) because of the tons of data that was going to flow from the processor to the main memory during video rendering. I chose the Intel Pentium 4 with a 533 MB/s front side bus (FSB) with 512 MB of PC1066 main memory. To accommodate all the digital video, I needed a fast, large hard disk. I would also need a DVD writer, of course, and video capture and editing tools.

Dell offered a system with all of this for $3,800, excluding shipping, handling, and taxes, of course — a very reasonable price, I thought. But their DVD burner was +R and +RW. (Was that good or bad? I honestly didn’t know.) The video capture and editing tools were made by Dazzle Multimedia. What were my other choices?

Researching a Bit-piece Purchase

Clearly it was time to do my research. So out to the Internet I went, looking for DVD burners first. What was the difference between +R and -R? Here is what I found out: DVD+R is being introduced as of the summer of 2002; it is to have faster read and write times. DVD-R drives have been around for a while, and supposedly have better backward compatibility with DVD computer drives and DVD movie players. But here is what I really learned: DVD+R drives are more expensive than DVD-R, and they are just being introduced to the market as of the writing of this article. Sony has introduced its DVD+R drives, but Pioneer and Panasonic have had DVD-R drives on the market for over a year.

The DVD Burner Drive

After a conversation with my friend who has had a Pioneer DVR-A03 for more than a year now, I decided to go with Pioneer’s newest drive: the DVR-A04, a 2X DVD-R/-RW. Why? It was cheaper, and it almost guaranteed me a greater probability of backwards compatibility than the DVD+R/+RW drive, the bugs were more likely to have been worked out, and it offered better software/ driver support.

I had selected the DVD drive I wanted; now I needed a system to support that drive. The DVD drive had a high-sustained data rate, and indeed, it is 2.7 MB/sec, which, on the surface, doesn’t seem all that high. But to sustain that rate over a 4.7 GB write operation might be a bit of a challenge for a slower system (<1 GHz processor with an ATA-33 interface). The Pioneer DVR-A04 drive has a 2 MB buffer, which should be sufficient to prevent underruns in most systems. But, still, I wanted that fast system.

The Large, Fast Hard Disk

The next thing I looked at was the hard disk. I had already read some good reviews of the Western Digital 120 GB hard disk with its 8 MB buffer. It has an ATA-100 interface, a rotation speed of 7200 RPM, and a 9 MS seek time. All in all, it was quite a good choice. But what about ATA-133 and Serial ATA? Well, the only manufacturer to offer ATA-133 is Maxtor, with its model 4G160J8, a 160 GB hard disk with a rotation speed of 5400 RPM and a 9.6 MS average seek time. On the other hand, Serial ATA has not been introduced yet, and I needed a large, high-speed hard disk now. I honestly wondered what the difference was, data movement-wise, between the Western Digital and the Maxtor in a real world test. Although the Maxtor 4G160J8 can move data through its interface at 133 MB/sec, it can only move data to and from its media at a rate of 43.4 MB/sec. On the other hand, the Western Digital has a maximum throughput of 100 MB/sec on its interface, and a 65.625 MB/sec data rate to and from its media. The Maxtor has a 2 MB buffer, whereas the Western Digital has an 8 MB buffer.

I chose the Maxtor drives simply because they were larger, and I bought two of them because I wanted plenty of space to store video clips. (A week after I made my decision, Western Digital introduced a 180 GB drive with an ATA-100 interface and a rotation speed of 7200 RPM. Rats! I just missed it! But, that’s what it is all about in the computer world, isn’t it?)

Video Capture/ Edit Tools

Dell Computer offered the Dazzle Digital Video Creator, but what else was on the market? Pinnacle Systems offered Studio Deluxe. Two of my friends were using the Pinnacle Systems and praised it for its ease of use and reasonable price. I had heard of Pinnacle Systems for quite some time now, so I decided to purchase the Studio Deluxe package because it handles both analog and digital video capture and editing. The editing section allows you to arrange your video clips, and to add titles and scene transitions into your video project. It also outputs video to tape or in .AVI, MPEG1, or streaming format.

The Chipsets

Intel’s 845G and 850E chipsets had just been introduced to the market and were only on three motherboards (Intel, ASUS and Gigabyte). Shuttle had also just introduced the SIS-648 chipset on their motherboard. The Intel motherboard (D850EMV2L) had a 533 MB/sec FSB, whereas the other two 850E motherboards (Gigabyte and ASUS) offered 1066 MB/sec FSB. The three 850E motherboards used RDRAM; the SIS-648 used SDRAM. Tom’s Hardware Guide testing showed that the Shuttle motherboard with the SIS-648 kept up with the 850E/RDRAM motherboards, but I could not find the Shuttle motherboard for sale anywhere on the web yet. One of the nice things the Shuttle motherboard offered was on-board IEEE-1394 (Firewire) support along with USB 2.0, among other things.

The Motherboard

I chose the Gigabyte GA-8IHXP based on what I had read on the Tom’s Hardware Guide web site, and on the number of items it offered (1066 FSB, LAN, USB 2.0, on-board audio, etc), but also on one very important item: RAID. Not only did this motherboard support ATA-33/66/100, but it also had a Promise 20276 chip on-board to support ATA-133 and RAID. In essence, the board could support EIGHT IDE drives! I liked that a lot! And as you will see later, it makes it easy to configure a nice, large, fast hard disk.

The Other Stuff

I chose the Intel Pentium 4 2.6 GHz because it was the slowest Pentium 4 with a 533 MB/sec FSB. And it was $100 cheaper than the 2.53 GHz version.

I decided to go with 512 MB of main memory because I thought that would be more than enough to process video. Just a gut feeling.

I chose the MSI G4Ti4200 video card solely because Tom’s Hardware Guide used it in a couple of their tests.

I had always wanted an 18″ LCD monitor. But I do love the 15″ monitor on my Dell laptop. I decided on the Sony only because of its reputation in the video industry.

I wanted a three-piece speaker system with a subwoofer. Around 50 watts would be nice. And it must have volume, bass and treble control on the front of one of the small speakers. The Cyber Acoustics CA-3770 was perfect for me, and reasonably priced, too.

The last major item I needed was a tape backup device. I had a Seagate 10/20 GB tape drive in my Dell, and, so far, was pleased with the device. (Although, in all honesty, I have never had to restore my system from one of them.) So I bought the updated Seagate 20/40 GB tape drive for my new system.

Making a List

So, now I had enough information to make my list of the perfect computer for me. And here it is.

Pricing the System

I used Tom’s Hardware Guide’s Shopping Comparison to judge pricing. In each case, www.Mwave.com popped up as having some of the best prices.

Buying the System

Early Tuesday afternoon, July 30, I called Mwave.com’s 1-800 number and asked Rafael if it would be better to e-mail, fax, or phone my list in to him. He said that since I was already on the phone, he would take my order then and there. I relayed my list to him, but told him that I was not sure which case I wanted, especially since Mwave.com offered so many. He looked over my list and noted that I had an ATX motherboard, four 31/2″ drives and one 51/4″ drive. I told him I was going to add another 31/2″ drive as a boot disk, and another 51/4″ drive as a read-only DVD drive. From that list he concluded that I would be happy with the Irwin J508 ATX Server Tower. It could handle four 51/4″ drives and five 31/2″ drives. And, because it was a server tower case, it also came with a 300-watt power supply. Very nice. Thank you, Rafael. I told Rafael to ship it second-day air so that I would have it by Friday. That would allow me to put it together over the weekend.

Sure enough, the whole system arrived on Friday via FedEx, and in four large boxes. A quick inventory revealed one of the boxes contained the Sony LCD monitor. Another had the Irwin case. The remaining two boxes had all of the other parts that would form the heart and soul of my computer. I could hardly contain my excitement the rest of that day at the prospect of assembling such an awesome computing machine. But I would have to wait until first thing Saturday morning. After all, I am a happily, newly married man with familial duties that ALWAYS come first. The computer could wait.

Assembling the system

I woke up a little earlier than normal for a Saturday morning on August 3, 2002. It was 7:30 AM. I made coffee and hurried upstairs to begin.

8:00 AM – I unpacked the Irwin PC case with its 300 watt power supply. There were a lot of screws, some cables for the front panel USB connectors, and a one-page instruction sheet. There was also a special set of screws to support the Intel Pentium 4 and its heat sink and fan. These four special screws help support the additional weight of the heat sink and fan right around the CPU area, but the Gigabyte motherboard did not have the matching holes.

Irwin J508 ATX Server Tower case.

I removed the two side covers and the front panel from the Irwin PC case and set the case aside for the moment.

8:15 AM – I unpacked the Gigabyte motherboard. There were a lot of cables and connectors. Also, there were two very nice instruction booklets and a Quick PC Installation Guide (QPCIG). I glanced through the instruction booklets, but found the QPCIG far more helpful initially. Thank you, Gigabyte; the colorful QPCIG is very helpful. I familiarized myself with board layout and followed most of the steps recommended by the QPCIG.

Gigabyte GA-8IHXP motherboard.

8:30 AM – I unpacked the Intel Pentium 4 with its heat sink and fan. I had no trouble at all mounting it to the motherboard. I think it would have been more difficult if the motherboard had been mounted in the case. There were three places on the Gigabyte motherboard to plug in a fan: System Fan, Power Fan and CPU Fan. Unfortunately, I plugged the CPU fan into the Power Fan plug initially, simply because of the way the fan cable wrapped naturally around the unit. I didn’t see the CPU Fan plug until later.

Intel Pentium 4 kit.

Assembling the system, Continued

8:45 AM – I unpacked the two Kingston memory sticks and mounted them on the motherboard in the sockets marked RIMM1 and RIMM2. The other two RIMM sockets had Continuity RIMM modules in them, which came with the motherboard.

8:50 AM – I mounted the Gigabyte motherboard in the case, and found the associated screws to hold it in place. The Irwin PC case came with five sets of screws: one copper grounding screw (not supported by the Gigabyte motherboard); seventeen #6×32 hex screws to hold the I/O panel covers in place; seventeen #6×32 4.5 screws to hold the motherboard and other parts in place; twenty #5×10 screws to hold the disk drives in place; and four special CPU support screws.

Motherboard mounted in case.

9:15 AM – I unpacked the MSI G4Ti4200 video card and mounted it in the AGP slot. The video card came with seven CDs and one Quick User’s Guide! One CD had the video drivers and utilities. The other six CDs contained games and such.

MSI G4Ti4200 Video card plugged in.

9:30 AM – I unpacked the Pioneer DVR-A04 DVD-R/RW Writer and mounted it in the case with the numerous screws provided by Irwin. I placed it in the top 51/4″ slot.

9:45 AM – I unpacked and mounted the 31/2″ floppy drive in the top 31/2″ slot.

10:00 AM – I unpacked and mounted the first 160 GB Maxtor hard disk in the first slot of the bottom section of the case.

10:15 AM – I unpacked and mounted the second 160 GB Maxtor hard disk in the second slot of the bottom section of the case.

Hard drives and tape storage mounted.

Assembling the system, Continued

10:30 AM – I unpacked and mounted 20 GB Seagate Tape Storage drive in the second slot of the middle section of the case. Unfortunately, that’s going to make it difficult, if not impossible, to hook it up as the second drive of the IDE2 cable, which is where I prefer to connect it. For some unknown reason, I have always preferred to connect my hard drive(s) to IDE1 and all others (CD and tape drives) to IDE2. I may have to break that rule this time.

10:45 AM – Now I had a choice to make. Should I use one of the two 160 GB Maxtor’s as my boot drive, or should I reserve them both for capturing video? I decided on the latter. I grabbed a spare Fujitsu 20 GB hard disk I had and installed it as my boot drive. It has an ATA-33/66/100 interface and should work fine for booting and holding the system/ application files. That will allow me to use the two 160 GB hard disk as video capture.

11:00 AM – I unpacked and set up the Sony LCD video monitor.

Sony SDM-S81/B 18″ video monitor.

11:15 AM – I unpacked and set up the keyboard and mouse. Although I had purchased a Microsoft Office keyboard with a USB interface, I opted to use a regular PC keyboard initially, just to get things up and running. I did hook up the Microsoft Intellimouse, though.

11:30 AM – I connected and ran power cables both inside and outside the case. I decided not to hook up any of the disk drives – just the motherboard and the floppy disk.

11:45 AM – The first power test worked fine. I got into the BIOS menu and set the time. I also looked around at what other things BIOS would allow me to adjust. (There were several.)

Boot up logo screen.

Assembling the system, Continued

12:00 PM – I took a break and joined my wife for lunch.

1:00 PM – I connected the DVD drive to IDE2 connector. I powered the system up OK, and BIOS recognized the drive correctly.

1:20 PM – The Gigabyte motherboard has four IDE connectors, two ATA-33/66/100 connectors and two ATA-133/RAID connectors. The Promise RAID controller 20276 chip drives the latter two connectors, labeled as IDE3 and IDE4. The BIOS allows you to set the Promise RAID controller as an ATA or RAID interface. But I didn’t know if the BIOS could be set up to boot from any drive connected to IDE3/4. I set the jumpers on the two Maxtor drives to “cable-select,” and used the 80-pin flat-ribbon cable to daisy chain interconnect the two drives to the IDE3 connector. The system powered up fine. BIOS recognized both drives, and I found out that the first drive (at the end of the IDE3 cable) can be set as a boot device. Thank you, Gigabyte! I love it!

1:35 PM – I connected the Fujitsu 20 GB hard drive to the end of the cable plugged into IDE1. The system powered up OK. BIOS recognized the 20 GB drive. I decided to make that my primary boot HD and leave the two Maxtor HDs as my video capture and storage devices.

2:00 PM – I found that the ATX_12V plug from the power supply wasn’t connected to the motherboard. According to Gigabyte’s documentation, this should have prevented the system from starting up. I plugged it in. The system still started up just fine.

AUX_12V cable to motherboard.

2:10 PM – I updated the notes in my journal (and saw wife off on her shopping trip).

2:40 PM – I traced out the USB connector cables coming from the front panel and tried to figure out how to connect them to the motherboard. I actually grabbed an ohmmeter and ohmed out the connection. Once I was sure I had it correct, I plugged in the cables. When I unplugged them to take pictures of them, I found their markings on the other side of the connectors! Boy, that was a waste of time!

3:00 PM – I put the covers on the case thinking I was finished with all the internal work.

3:10 PM – I noticed the floppy drive LED was on constantly. I had seen this before – the data cable was on backward. How could a keyed cable be installed wrong? I know it was keyed – I saw the key. I removed the covers and disconnected the floppy drive data cable and, sure enough, the cable was on upside down. Don’t ask me how, but somehow I managed to plug a keyed connector into its socket upside down.

Loading the Software

3:25 PM – Tried to boot MS-DOS 6.2. Couldn’t do it!?! I found that quite interesting. The error message I got was, “Non-System disk or disk error. Replace and press any key when ready.”

3:30 PM – In order to start the installation of Windows 2000, I had to change the boot order in the BIOS settings. Once that was done, I booted from the Windows 2000 CD. Oops, but which one? There are two CDs in the MS Windows 2000 package. A CD labeled “Step-by-step,” and the one called “Windows 2000.” Oh, and the little manual that Microsoft enclosed with the CDs ASSUMES the manufacturer has already installed the operating system, so it begins with the Windows Setup Wizard. Thanks, Microsoft. After inserting the “Step-by-step” CD, I quickly learned it was NOT bootable.

3:50 PM – I booted from the Windows 2000 CD. After a full minute of loading itself up, it found the 20 GB drive. Windows 2000 offered me the option of formatting the 20 GB hard disk with FAT, FAT32 or NTFS. I jumped out on the Internet to refresh my memory of these three formats. Although I didn’t need the security aspect of NTFS, I did appreciate the fact that it did appear to be less sensitive to system re-boots in the middle of hung operations. What a relief – no more ‘Scandisk’ on start up. It took 20 minutes to format it with NTFS.

4:15 PM – I began the Windows 2000 installation to my newly formatted 20 GB boot system hard disk.

4:30 PM – I left the installation program running while my wife and I stepped out for dinner.

9:00 PM – I returned to resume the installation. The installation procedure had halted when it needed network installation information. I decided to skip this step for now. I didn’t have the proper length cable to run it over to my network hub. (Why is it so difficult to get the network working if it is done at a later time (i.e., post-installation)?)

9:20 PM – The Windows 2000 installation procedure was completed. The total time was about 30 minutes.

9:25 PM – As a reference, I clocked the time it took Windows 2000 to shut down from the mouse click on “OK” to system off: six seconds. Some programs will cause the system to hang during shut down. I try to keep (or remove) those programs that take excessive amounts of time to boot-up or shut down the system.

9:30 PM – The system boot up time: 23 seconds to “Starting Windows” logo screen and one minute to the “Log on Window” screen.

9:35 PM – I installed the video drivers from MSI CD, and set the desktop video screen to 1024×768 16-bit color. Display Properties – Settings menu says the video can be set to 1280×1024 and 32-bit True Color with the MSI video card, but the print on an 18″ video monitor gets awfully small at those settings. 1024×768 16-bit color works fine for me.

Loading the Software, Continued

9:40 PM – I installed Pioneer DVD software and drivers from the accompanying CD. The application program “RecordNow” by Veritas, included on the Pioneer CD, has a nice layout and is very intuitive to use. It allows you to record data or audio onto a CD or DVD recordable disc. The other application program included on the Pioneer CD was Drive Letter Assignment (DLA). After formatting a CD or DVD, DLA can assign a drive letter to the Pioneer DVD drive and make it appear as a normal read-write disk drive to the operating system. I don’t know why or how I would want to use that, but it may come in handy, some day. I do have over 3 GB of digital images and 2 GB of music that I want to back up on something faster than tape. I believe a DVD disc would be the perfect place to store back up copies of these large collections.

9:55 PM – I installed the Microsoft IntelliMouse software and driver. I bought IntelliMouse because I really like the wheel between the left and right click buttons.

10:00 PM – The Gigabyte motherboard came with Intel Chipset software for the 850E chip, so I installed it. I have no idea what it does. There was no supporting literature to tell me what it does. On the same CD, there was also an Intel Application Accelerator, which I installed. Once again, I have no idea what that does, either.

10:15 PM – I re-booted the system and went searching for my two Maxtor drives. Using the Disk Manager (under Computer Management in Administrative Tools in the Control Panel), Windows 2000 did not recognize the two drives hooked to an ATA-133 interface. I went back into the BIOS and insured the interface was set to ATA on the Promise 20276 chip. It was. The Promise software signed on during boot up, searched for and registered both Maxtor drives. I entered the Promise driver by pressing CTRL-F during its search sequence and got a menu of configuration settings for the attached drives. I set it to configure these drives as two separate ATA devices. I then allowed the system to continue to boot.

11:15 PM – Now in Windows, I used Add/ Remove Hardware in the Control Panel to load the Promise driver software. Once that was loaded, I re-booted the system and re-entered the Disk Manager. I now had another drive. Windows 2000 wanted to know what kind of volume the new device was going to be: simple, spanned, striped or system. I set it to simple. I elected to assign drive letter E: to the entire device as a single partition. Windows 2000 informed me that the new drive E: had 152 GB of unallocated space.

11:30 PM – I started formatting drive E: with FAT32 but saw no indications of any activity other than the drive LED was on. I shut the system down and went to bed.

Sunday August 4, 2002

1:40 PM – I started the system from a cold boot. The boot time to logon window was 55 seconds.

1:45 PM – I installed Acrobat 5.0 from the Gigabyte motherboard utilities CD because I have so many PDF files.

1:55 PM – I installed the Direct 8.1 driver from the Gigabyte motherboard utilities CD. I believe the Direct 8.1 driver is used primarily by games.

Problems with the Hard Drives

2:00 PM – I started formatting Drive E: again with NTFS. No indications of what is going on.

3:30 PM – Still no indication of any activity, so I exited out of format program and rebooted the machine.

3:45 PM – Checked Drive E: with Explorer. It said Drive E: needed formatting. So I started it from there. Again, no indication of any activity, other than the front panel drive LED was on solid.

5:00 PM – I rebooted the machine again. I moved the slave Maxtor from IDE3 port to IDE1 on the same cable as the boot disk. I started up the machine and used the Disk Manager to start formatting the Maxtor with a FAT32 format. This time I saw a percentage completion indication in the Disk Manager window. An hour and a half later, a window popped open to tell me that the drive volume was too large to complete the formatting. Boy, that sucks! What’s the size limit on FAT32? I thought it was 2 Terabytes? Why is Windows 2000 telling me a 152 GB drive is too large to format in FAT32?

6:30 PM – I rebooted system and started formatting the drive with NTFS. Once again, I got the percentage completion indication in the Disk Manager window, and an hour and 20 minutes later, it completed. Properly, this time, thank you very much.

Monday August 5, 2002

10:00 AM – I decided to run some real world speed/ timing tests on the newly formatted 152 GB hard drive. I ran ‘copy’ from the MS-DOS command prompt and copied a 500 MB file from the Pioneer DVR-A04 DVD drive (D:) to the 150 GB HD (E:). It took 208 seconds (timed with a stopwatch) for a transfer rate of about 2.5 MB/sec. The Pioneer DVD drive has a maximum read speed of 24x, but this falls far short of that figure. This is closer to 16x. I will have to look into that later.

10:15 AM – Next, I used MS-DOS to copy the 500 MB from Drive E: to Drive C:. That took 17.5 seconds, for a transfer rate of 30.6 MB/sec. Not bad for an ATA-33/66/100 interface.

10:30 AM – To confirm these figures, I used MS-DOS to copy a 4 GB file from a CD in Drive D: to the hard disk Maxtor Drive E: in 1277 seconds, for a transfer rate of 2.8 MB/sec. Then I copied the same files from Drive E: to Drive C: in 164 seconds, for a transfer rate of 25.5 MB/sec — still pretty close to the ATA-33 maximum speed of 33 MB/sec.

11:00 AM – I ate breakfast and read the Promise RAID Function User’s Manual. It says I can set the two drives up as a single large hard drive in the RAID 0 configuration, if I set both their configuration jumpers to ‘master.’ It didn’t sound right to me, but it was time to experiment!

12:00 PM – I removed both of the Maxtor hard disks and set their jumpers to ‘master’ just like it says on page 7 of the Promise RAID Function User’s Manual.

12:10 PM – I booted the system up and set BIOS to RAID. Only one 152 GB drive was recognized by the system. As I suspected, the book was misleading.

12:20 PM – I removed the second Maxtor hard disk drive, set its jumper to ‘slave’ and re-installed it.

Problems with the Hard Drives, Continued

12:30 PM – I rebooted the system. This time, both drives are recognized by the Promise Configuration Manager. I pressed at the Promise RAID setup prompt and auto-configured the two drives as RAID-0. The system reported that I now had a 305.33 GB drive. Very nice!

12:35 PM – When I booted the system up this time, Windows 2000 said it had found a new device (a RAID Controller) and was ready to install WinNT Promise MBUltra133 Lite Controller. The Promise RAID Function User’s Manual said I should load Win2000 Promise MBUltra133 Lite Controller, but it was not listed as one of the driver load options. I honestly wondered if there was a real difference between the WinNT and the Win2000 drivers.

12:45 PM – I jumped out on the Internet and found Gigabyte’s website. I downloaded all their newest software and drivers for the GA-8IHXP motherboard.

1:45 PM – I installed the Win2000 Promise MBUltra133 Lite Controller driver and rebooted the system.

2:00 PM – This time, Windows 2000’s Disk Manager recognized that I had a 305.33 GB hard drive. After giving it a volume name, I started formatting it with FAT32.

4:00 PM – Windows 2000 Disk Manager reports that the volume is too large to format.

4:15 PM – I deleted the old 305.33 GB volume and created three 102 GB volumes, figuring I could divvy up the video I had to store across the three partitions. All partitions will be FAT32 formats.

4:35 PM – Windows 2000 Disk Manager reported Drive E: is too large to format, again, as a 102 GB partition! Oh, that really sucks now! I deleted the volume, all three partitions, and rebooted the system.

4:40 PM – I used the Windows 2000 Disk Manager to format the whole drive as 305.33 GB using NTFS. It took an hour and 20 minutes.

Completed formatting of Maxtor hard drives.

6:00 PM – Done! I now had a 305.33 GB hard drive as Drive E:, hooked to an ATA-133 interface. That should be fast enough to handle the video capture program. And big enough to handle the hours of video I had.

7:20 PM – As a quickie speed time test, I MS-DOS copied 4 GB from Drive C: to Drive E: in 134 seconds, for a real world transfer rate of 31.2 MB/sec.

Completing the Software Load

7:30 PM – I took a break and joined my wife for dinner.

9:50 PM – I stated the installation of Microsoft Office 2000. After hitting ‘Next’ a couple of times and typing in the CD key code, it pretty much ran on autopilot for the next 40 minutes.

10:30 PM – Microsoft Office 2000 completed its installation. Why does Microsoft Office only partially install itself with ONLY the stuff Microsoft thinks you will use? I use Microsoft’s Photo Editor, but I don’t use Outlook or Internet Explorer. I guess from this day forward, I am forced to do a custom installation.

10:45 PM – I had purchased a Microsoft Office keyboard, which has lots of extra buttons across the top of the keyboard – 13 to be exact, and six more along the side. I liked the idea of pushing a single key to start Word, Excel and other commonly used applications. I installed the software driver for the Microsoft Office Keyboard and shut down the system. The new keyboard plugs into the USB port, so I plugged it in and re-started the system. I pressed the DEL key at the BIOS banner window, but the command was ignored. The system continued to boot up. I read Microsoft’s Office keyboard guide. This eight-page manual contained one page of health warnings, a third of a page on software operations, and six and a half pages on license agreements and limited warranty information. Why do they even bother? I shut the system down again. In the Microsoft Office keyboard’s packing box, there was a USB-to-keyboard adapter plug. I inserted the adapter plug between the Microsoft Office keyboard USB plug and the PC keyboard connector, and started up the system. I pressed the DEL key at the BIOS banner window, again. This time it went into BIOS. Thank you, Microsoft.

11:00 PM – The Pinnacle System Studio Deluxe came with three CDs, three manuals, a PCI video capture card (AVDV board), video connector extension panel (BlueBox), and an IEEE-1394 cable. Pinnacle Studio version 7.11 is used to capture and edit analog or digital video into ‘album’ scenes. The album scenes can then be dragged and dropped into the ‘movie window’ in any order you want them. Titles, transitions, voice-over, and background music can be added to your movie, and then saved as a project. The completed project can then be made (rendered) into analog or digital video output. Video output formats include .AVI (Windows Media), MPEG1 or MPEG2, analog (VHS), or streaming (RealVideo) video.

Pinnacle System Studio Deluxe also comes with a CD that contains Pinnacle Express. This application program basically allows you to take your digital video (DV) straight from your camcorder to DVD. There are some editing tools, but nothing like there is in the full Studio package.

The third CD in the Pinnacle System Studio Deluxe package contains Hollywood FX, which “offers an impressive array of 3D transitions and effects.” Their words, not mine.

I shut the system down, and plugged the Pinnacle System AVDV board into my computer. I plugged the BlueBox cable in, and fired the system back up.

I loaded the first CD (Studio Deluxe) on my system. Installation went very smoothly. I started the program up and looked at the interface. I shut the system down, and promised myself that I would read the Pinnacle Studio manual before I used it the next time.

11:35 PM – I broke for the Jay Leno “Tonight Show.”

Testing the System

Tuesday, August 6, 2002

8:40 AM – I read through the Pinnacle Studio manual. At first, I was a little daunted by the 280+ page manual, but after reading the first 50 pages or so, I felt I was ready to capture and even edit some video. I got my Sony Handycam, which can record up to two hours of Hi8 analog video on little cassettes. This particular camera has an S-video and video/ audio jacks on the side of the camera. I connected the S-video and the audio from the camcorder to the Pinnacle BlueBox.

Capture/ Editing Video

10:00 AM – I had 12 Hi8 videocassette tapes that I wanted to digitize. I grabbed the first one and checked the amount of video I had recorded on it. On this particular camera, you can fast forward the tape to the end, set the counter to zero and then rewind the tape. After rewinding, the counter will show the total time recorded on the tape as a negative time unit number. Then, as the tape plays, it counts down to zero.

10:10 AM – I started up the Pinnacle System program and selected the ‘Capture’ mode. The Capture window told me I had 15 GB of free disk on space on the C: Drive, which equated to 65 minutes of video capture storage space. I clicked on the “Settings” button and changed the video storage drive from C: to E:. Pinnacle allows you to select the capture quality (good, better, best or custom), and then it calculates the storage time based on free disk space. I had 305.33 GB of free disk space, which, according to the video capture quality I selected (default), gave me 211/2 hours of video storage.

The Capture screen’s “Settings” menu also gave me the option of testing the read/ write data rate of the hard disk. My boot disk is a Fujitsu model MPG3204AH 20GB, which supports an ATA-33/66/100 (100 MB/sec transfers in Ultra mode 5), tested out at 36.4 MB/sec read rate and 30.6 MB/sec write rate, according to Pinnacle System software. On the other hand, the two Maxtor drives configured in RAID0 connected to an ATA-133 interface as one large 305.33 GB drive returned a 54.2 MB/sec read rate and a 53.7 MB/sec write rate.

10:20 AM – The camcorder reported one hour and five minutes of recorded video on the first videocassette. I started the capture process by simply pushing ‘Play’ on the camcorder and clicking on ‘Start Capture’ in the Pinnacle Capture screen. An hour and five minutes later, Pinnacle had converted analog video into 44 scenes of digital video. Pinnacle uses a number of tricks to detect scene transitions. It breaks a video stream down into “scenes” and displays them as small (thumbnail) photographs, each thumbnail showing the first frame of that scene. These scenes were placed in an “album” and displayed across the top of the screen in time-indexed sequence. Each of the 44 scenes was displayed just like a photograph in an album, with the scene number and the length of the scene shown beside each thumbnail.

11:25 AM – I now had my first digitized video to edit and play with. I switched the Pinnacle program from the capture mode to ‘edit.’ I used drag-and-drop to drag scenes from the album and drop them into the ‘movie window,’ which looks like three rows of blank filmstrips. Each filmstrip has nine frames in it. (See photo below.)

Pinnacle System screen shot.

I added a title, some transitions, and a voice-over commentary to the video and saved the project.

I switched Studio Deluxe from edit to ‘make movie’ mode. I chose to save the 5 minute 13 second video in MPEG1 format. Studio Deluxe offered eight preset formats, including RealVideo, VideoCD, Multimedia, VHS, SVCD, DVD and custom. The chart below shows some of the settings, sizes and options that Pinnacle offers.

Pinnacle offers a wide variety of formats in which to save your video. Once you save it, the next thing to do is put it on CD or DVD.

Making a Data CD and a Movie DVD Disk

There are a couple of ways to put movies onto CDs or DVDs:

1. If the movie file is less than 700 MB, then you can create a normal data disc on CD or DVD and copy the movie onto the disc as if it were a normal computer data file. The receiver of the disc would then have the option of playing the movie from its CD/ DVD drive if the drive is fast enough. Otherwise, the receiver would have to copy the movie to the hard disk first in order to play it without skips and/ or pauses. (Obviously, movie files larger than 700 MB can only be stored on DVD, unless you want to break the file up.) The Veritas program “RecordNow” that came with the Pioneer drive can be used to write data to CD-R/RW or DVD-R/RW.

2. The other way to put a movie on a CD or DVD is to make it a Video CD (VCD), a Super-VCD (SVCD), or a DVD movie format.

Pinnacle System Studio Deluxe does not have the facilities to make a CD or DVD. You must use their companion program, called Pinnacle Express, to make a VCD, SVCD or DVD movie. Pinnacle Express takes DV from a digital camcorder to make (oops, sorry, transcode, compile and burn) a CD or DVD after some minor editing, if necessary. Pinnacle Express can also import Windows Media files (AVI) and transcode, compile and burn a CD or DVD.

3:30 PM – I finished editing my first video. I added titles, transitions, voice-over and background music to it. The video was almost 30 minutes long. I was now ready to save it as an MPEG1 file to copy to a CD. I switched Studio Deluxe to the ‘Make Movie’ mode. Studio Deluxe told me the MPEG file size would be approximately 558 MB. It took Studio Deluxe 20 minutes to render the MPEG file and save it to disk. But the file size turned out to be 581 MB! That was too large for me to put on a CD with the 163 MB of other data I wanted to put on there.

4:10 PM – I removed a three-minute scene from my video project and re-rendered it. The 26 minute 40 second video took 18 minutes to render and generated a MPEG file of 520 MB. I moved the MPEG video file into a folder that I wanted burn onto a CD. The total folder size was 685 MB.

4:30 PM – I started up the Veritas program “RecordNow” that came with the Pioneer drive, and inserted an 80 min/ 700 MB CD-R into the DVD drive. I used the RecordNow’s wizard to make a data disc in three easy steps. It took 10 minutes 45 seconds to write the 685 MB of data to the CD, and 6 minutes and 30 seconds to verify it. I checked the CD on two other computers, and it worked fine. I could access the data files (a couple of Word documents) and view the still photos I had placed on the disc with no problem at all. I could also play the MPEG movie files straight from the disc. Both of the other computers have DVD drives, so they had faster read speeds than normal CD drives.

As a side note, RecordNow has a button labeled ‘DVD Data Extraction Speed Test.’ I inserted a data CD into the Pioneer DVD drive, and RecordNow reported that the CD data extraction speed rate was 8.1X. When I put a data DVD in the drive, I got 2.2X. According to Pioneer’s manual, the Maximum Read Speed for the drive is 24X for CDs (CAV) and 6X for DVDs (CAV). On the other hand, the Write Speed is listed at 1X and 2X for DVD-R (CLV), and 4X and 8X for CD-R (CLV).

5:00 PM – Lastly, I tried to make a DVD movie disc. I had ordered 100 DVD-R discs for $89.00 from CDRsolution.com. I used Studio Deluxe to put together a 38 minute 38 second video, and saved it as an AVI file. It took over an hour to save the 8.5 GB file! Then I started up Studio Express and imported the same AVI file. Studio Express insisted on scanning the file first for scene breaks, which took a few minutes, and then took a couple more minutes to read the file in. Since I had no editing to do on this program, I just glanced through Studio Express’ editor. It had detected the scene breaks that I had inserted in Studio Deluxe, and used them to set up the standard DVD movie ‘scene selection’ menu. As a first time user, they seemed fine. I selected the ‘Create a disc’ option. I inserted a DVD-R into the Pioneer drive and pressed the start button on the Studio Express screen. Studio Express executed a two-step write to disc process: Composing the contents (also called rendering or creating the files), and writing to disc. One hour and 45 minutes later, I had a DVD movie disc! It was that easy.

7:00 PM – I inserted my newly made DVD disc into my Panasonic DVD movie player. It started up with the scene selection screen. I pressed the play button and, voila, the movie started! The picture quality and the audio level were very good. But, after a few minutes, I noticed the audio was out of sync with the action (lip movement).

So, I’m not a perfect film editor. But this was a great learning experience. And I got myself a kick-ass system!

Summary and Conclusions

I needed a PC to convert analog videos to DVD movies. My research lead me to believe I could purchase the parts and put together a better system than I could purchase as a whole, pre-configured, preloaded system. I still stand by that statement.

I made extensive use of the Internet generally and Tom’s Hardware Guide specifically to read up on the latest technology and compare numerous points of my proposed system, including:

• DVD-R/RW versus DVD+R/RW;
• Sony DVD+R/RW versus Pioneer DVD-A04 (-104);
• Western Digital 120 GB HD versus Maxtor 160 GB;
• Dazzle Multimedia versus Pinnacle System;
• Intel 845E versus 845G versus 850 versus 850E;
• Intel 850E versus SIS-648;
• ATA-100 versus ATA-133 versus Serial ATA;
• ASUS versus Gigabyte versus Shuttle; purchase from Mwave.com versus Memory4Less.com.

Once I chose the DVD-R/RW drive and the 160 GB hard disk drives, everything else fell into place. Once again, I found myself on Tom’s Hardware Guide comparing prices. Putting the system together was fun and took less time than I thought.

Microsoft has almost got their operating system and office software installation down pat. The other software and application programs installed smoothly.

Pinnacle System Studio Deluxe made it very easy and intuitive to capture, edit, and make digital movies from analog videotapes. Pinnacle Express made it easy to make CDs and DVDs of those movies.

Finally, it is my opinion that current technology is ready to convert analog videotapes to digital video that is suitable to place on a DVD (in the form of a movie or data disc) at a reasonable price and distribute to other family members or to bore you friends with.

Jim Tomlinson joined Intel in 1986 as a design engineer after he retired from the U.S. Air Force. During his 12 years with Intel, he designed desktop and laptop motherboards for OEMs. He also worked on several special projects with microcontrollers. One of the special projects was the digitization of analog video to playback on a PC from a CD-ROM in 1990! In 1997, Jim went to work for Citibank in New York where he was working on putting a secure Internet communication device for banking transactions into a multichip module.