Which video format should I use to digitize my analog home movies?

Answer 1

AVI or MPEG2. You don't specify what you want to do with the video once it is digitized.

With iether you can turn them into a dvd and spare them for prosperity but mpeg2 will be best, in my mind.

There is a lot of debate about what is best. It will also depend largely on what you want to do with the home movies and how many years you want it to last interms of format/codec support.

Windows media VIdeo is a good option but it's a priority format so it might no longer be supported in 10 or 20 years.

Mpeg 2 has been around a long time and I beleive it will last long in terms of support as most of the newer optical based technologies still use it for video encoding. It however requires that your video be captured at a very high bitrate to preserve quality if you want it to be full frame PAL(25fps, 720x576) or NTSC(23.97, 720x480). It will take a lot of space so it's going to cost you in terms of storage media. Capturing to mpeg2 also requires less system resources so even an oldish pc or celeron could handle caputring at medium bitrates.

Alternativly Divx is a high quality codec which can be used to encode video and preserve most of the quality while reducing the amount of disk space needed. Future support is likely.
Divx and Xvid are very similar AVI codecs but Divx is slightly better in terms of quality but Xvid is open source so is could pottentially be supported for the next 50 years. It is not reccommended for capturing video unless you have a very high end system.

I have captured and converted many VHS tapes for convertion to DVD and mpeg 2 is the format of video that has given me the best results. it is however slightly difficult to edit the video without good video editing tools.

This site is a grewat read if you are just starting out with video capturing.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/dvdguides/capture/intro.htm

Answer 2

The highest quality to save them for editing is DV (Digital Video). But this does take a huge amount of space, but it is the best to preserve them if you can. The second choice is to burn from the DV to a DVD which will compress them. You usually can only fit 90 minutes on a DVD.

If you are using a Macintosh, iMovie comes with the Mac for free. It captures video from analog in DV format.

Answer 3

digital