Between 1958 and 1974, my grandfather made home movies with an 8MM camera. For Christmas 1996, my dad and I decided to convert those old 8MM films to a digital format to give to each family member. Our plan was to burn the videos on to CD-R's to give to the family. Although the DVD specification was created a year before, DVD-Video's didn't come to the US until 1997. We were a bit a head of our time.
Our setup was to put to tape a white piece of paper on a wall. We set up the 8MM projector to project onto the paper. We pointed our video camera (one of the big ones that you put a full VHS tape into) at the paper. Our computer had a Hauppage video capture card hooked up to the camera using an RCA cable. The computer had a state of the art Pentium 150Mhz processor in it.
Although it was a lot of horse power for the day, real time encoding of video was a problematic task. I did a lot of test recordings using various software and codecs to find the right mix that would allow us to encode in real time. We settled on R Bartick's RBCap using Intel Indeo 5. We encoded 320x240 video at 15 fps using 1101.0 kbps in yuv410p colorspace.
We encoded 22 movies into 3.8gb of data, split into 7 CD-Rs. This was a time when blank CD-R's were $1.50, and came with jewel cases. We got a discount for buying 100 blanks for $100. We had to make 7 sets so it was worth it. At this time, CD-R drives were 1x, and were very sensitive. The screensaver going on was enough of a CPU spike do disrupt the burning process and turn the CD into a coaster.
This was an amazing feat for us.
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