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I have a Dazzle DVC 100 that I'm using to connect an old 8mm camcorder up to in an attempt to digitize all our home movies.

The videos are all NTSC SD I believe and I've had the best success at recording with FFmpeg.

I wonder about the video size and framerates as I want the ideal recording. Should the ratio be 720x480? From what I read 720x480 is NTSC DV but some others said it should be 640x480 (based on the pixels being square) or 720x486 NTSC SD.

Also is there any advantage in recording at a higher framerate? NTSC SD is 29.97 is it worth doubling the framerate to 59.94? The file size doubles due to the fact of recording two times the standard frames in a second. Is it just duplicating frames at that point and meaningless?

ffmpeg -thread_queue_size 1024 -f alsa -t 1500 -i hw:2 -f video4linux2 -video_size 720x480 -i /dev/video0 -framerate 29.97 -c:v mpeg2video -flags +ilme+ildct movie_0001.mpg
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I would suggest encoding to H264 in MP4. Making it square-pixel is fine, Deinterlace first. Doubling framerate has no use here (Exception would be if you used an interpolation filter to generate full frames for each existing field, but that's not needed here). 

ffmpeg -f alsa -thread_queue_size 1024 -t 1500 -i hw:2
       -f video4linux2 -video_size 720x480 -framerate 30000/1001 -i /dev/video0
       -vf yadif,scale=640:480,setsar=1
       -c:v libx264 -crf 21 movie_0001.mp4
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  • That did give me a better quality image. Do you know if there is a way to link the -t filter for both inputs? I noticed that the audio cut out but the video kept playing due to the -t being in front of the audio input.
    – krizzo
    Jun 28, 2017 at 6:01
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    Place the -t after all the inputs.
    – Gyan
    Jun 28, 2017 at 6:05
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    @LF4 I wouldn't bother with the scale+setsar. I think a sane player should handle it fine as is. If the video is noisy consider adding a denoising filter such as hqdn3d after yadif: as a side effect it will help compression. If it's analog, such as from Video8, you can use the crop filter to remove any annoying video head noise (the ~10px crap at the bottom of screen).
    – llogan
    Jun 30, 2017 at 2:27

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