How to make a Video-CD

This will help you successfully create your very first VCD.

Many people have lots of video on tape, either analog (e.g. VHS, Betamax, Hi-8) or digital (e.g. Digital8, miniDV). Magnetic tape will deteriorate over time and is therefore not very suitable for storing video over long periods of time. A better way to preserve it is to put it in digital form on disc, which is far less susceptible to deterioration. A second reason is that video on discs can be easily copied without any loss of quality. And, last but not least, players that use tape will sooner or later, be completely pushed off the market by players using discs.

Below the creation of your own video on discs is explained step by step.

• Step 1: Capturing
• Step 2: Editing
• Step 3: Encoding
• Step 4: Authoring and burning

Step 1: Capturing

The first step is to get the video in a digital format on the hard drive of your PC. This process is called capturing. If your source material is analog tape you will need a special capture card installed on your computer. Currently, they can be bought from around $100 and up. Through this card you can connect your VCR or Camcorder to your PC.

The capture card is essentially an ADC (Analog Digital Converter) that converts the analog video signal in a digital format and then stores the digital data on the hard-drive Most capture cards will convert the video to AVI format while some will convert directly to MPEG. If you have the video on Digital8, it doesn´t need to be converted, but can be transferred directly to your hard-drive The most common way to do this is through a Firewire connection.

Video capturing is a real time process: converting and storing to the hard drive is done at the same speed as the video is played. This means that your processor and hard disk writing speed must be sufficient to keep up. Fortunately, the latest standard PC´s will have no problem with that. Another thing that should be kept in mind is that digital video takes up a lot of space on your hard drive. The bigger the hard drive the better; we recommend at least 10GB of available space.

Step 2: Editing