digitazing VHS tapes

[Darinka Andjelkovic]

Dear Info-CHILDES,

I plan to digitize my VHS video tapes on child speech and I do not 
know what hardware and software equipment I need, and what format should we use for this. PC Pentium 3 and 4 computers are available to us, but we are
not sure about other hardware and software details: RAM, MHz, operative
system, video and sound perfomances. Also what format and compression
should be chosen in digitizing and so on.

We made few trials in
DivX MPEG 4 - 3000kb/s (for video) and
DivX MP3 - 128kb/s, 48khz, mono (for sound)
but had problem with synchronicity of video and sound. It happened with some
tapes that asynchronicity appeared at some points, and then accumulated
towards the end of the tape, so that it became so big that we cannot work
with such material.

Another trial was with MPEG format (I understood it was MPEG1) and
asynchronicity did not apear, but while playing it happened at some points
that picture would freeze for a moment or even about 10-15 seconds. Sound
would go on, but the the picture would stay for a while. Also the quality of
the picture was not as good as on the original tape (it may become important
at some points where a child is holding or playing with small objects, or
pointing to some small picture in a book and we need to know exactly what
was that). 

I understand DVD is a kind of standard for this job, but the price of DVD disks is much higher then ordinary CD. This is an important issue in my country (especialy with a large quantitity of material), and we are trying to make it less expensive but not japardizing the quality.
Is there anybody who could help? 
(keep in mind that I work with PC, not Mac).

I would like to hear about DVD and other formats as well.

Thanks in advance and warm regards,

Darinka Andjelkovic
dandjelk at f.bg.ac.yu
Laboratory for Experimental Psychology
Faculty of Philosophy
University of Belgrade
Cika Ljubina 18-20
11000 Belgrade
Serbia and Montenegro

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