Home videos to DivX

[pseudonym]

I have about 30 hours of family video shot on analog 8mm tape. I have an analog-to-digital converter and can feed the video into the computer via firewire. I would like to store the video as DivX video on a DivX-formatted DVD, as I can fit quite a bit on each DVD (I have already converted the whole lot to MPEG-2 format and stored it on video-DVDs, but sometimes the quality leaves a bit to be desired).

What is the best method for transferring the data to DivX?

 

Is it possible to feed the digitized video directly into Toast, or do I have to use Quicktime?

 

You might ask, Why would I want to store the video in this format? My answer is that, in my experience, the quality of the transfer is sometimes better (i.e. smoother motion) using DivX than MPEG-2. Why this should be so, I don't know.

 

Thanks, KK

[pseudonym]

Thanks, tsantee.

But I didn't make myself clear. Is there an option for importing video straight from the camera (in this case the analog-to-digital converter) such that Toast could do the DivX encoding "on the fly"?

[tsantee]

I'm not certain you'll get better quality with DivX than with the MPEG 2 encoding. It probably depends on what was used to encode the MPEG 2 video and how much compression was used. In any case you should test with some scenes where you're unhappy with the MPEG 2 quality to see if this is going to be worth the effort.

 

The process for making the conversion is simple. Just add the files you captured with your device in the Toast video window, click on one or more titles in the window and choose Export. You should experiment with one of the custom DivX export settings to make sure you don't get a distorted picture. Click the options button in the Export window and then choose Advanced Settings. In the Aspect Ratio setting do a test with both 4:3 and 1:1 to see which is best for your video.

[tsantee]

Thanks, tsantee.

But I didn't make myself clear. Is there an option for importing video straight from the camera (in this case the analog-to-digital converter) such that Toast could do the DivX encoding "on the fly"?

No. I'm not aware of any Divx encoder that does real-time encoding. The closest thing is Elgato's Turbo.264 which will do H.264 encoding in nearly real time depending on the speed of your processor. Even so, I don't think it encodes from a streaming source so you'd still have to capture the video first.