Automating our home video imports
17 days ago
- #digitization
- #automation
- #home-videos
- The author's mom proposed digitizing old home videos, but the quoted cost of $4000 was deemed too high.
- The author recalls previous attempts to digitize tapes in high school but questions the quality and completeness of those efforts.
- Different formats of home videos include Data CDs/DVDs, Video DVDs, MiniDV tapes, and Hi8 tapes, each requiring specific methods for digitization.
- MiniDV tapes store digital data, while Hi8 tapes use analog signals, affecting the quality and method of digitization.
- Composite capture and dvlink are two methods for extracting video from tapes, with dvlink offering a more lossless transfer for MiniDV.
- The author aims to archive videos in their raw formats (ISO for discs, .dv for tapes) before converting to MKV for smaller file sizes.
- dvrescue is a utility used for capturing DV byte streams from tapes, with modifications made to improve functionality.
- An automated pipeline was developed to handle the digitization process, including device discovery, tape control, and transcoding.
- Video quality varies between Hi8 and MiniDV tapes, with MiniDV showing more variance due to the original recording quality.
- Interlacing in DV tapes can cause visual artifacts, which can be mitigated with deinterlacing algorithms.
- Clip extraction from long video files is challenging, with transnetv2 performing best among tested methods for scene detection.
- Gemini Pro was attempted for clip labeling but faced content filtering issues, while transnetv2 provided reliable scene detection.
- The author emphasizes the importance of digitizing now due to decreasing hardware support and improving ML model capabilities.