new to boards & need help w/convert film to digital

[cls]

I am new to this form and am very much a novice. I am hoping that someone can either enlighten me or provide me with a resource for obtaining the following:

I need to understand the process of converting film to digital. I need to know what software is needed in order to compress files and upload them to the web. Is this something I can do in the comfort of my own home or would I need to outsource this?

To get more to the point – I am an actress and would like to take the work of myself and a few of my peers and showcase it on the web.

If for instance I was given films in any of the following formats VHS, S-VHS, Beta Sp, Mini DV, DV Cam – what software, if any, could I use to compress it and upload it to the internet at broadcast quality?

If the films were given to me on CD or DVD would the process be the same, what software, if any, could I use to upload it and show it over the internet at broadcast quality?

Thank you in advance.

 

[MarkG]

For broadcast quality you're looking at huge files. Most showreels I've seen on the web are at half resolution, at best.

Certainly the 640x480 MPEG-4 files I've been making to send copies of videos to a friend in America are around 20 megabytes a minute and look about as good as the DVD version.

As for the process, basically you're going to have to get the video into your computer, then edit it down to whatever you want the final compilation to be, then compress that with a high-compression codec like MPEG-4, real video or whatever. It's probably easier to use DVDs than analogue video formats since, at least on PCs, there are free programs which will rip DVD files and convert them to .avi files: I presume there's something similar for Macs.

 

[cls]

Thank you for your responses. This helps me a great deal.