Capturing Laserdisc - The Making Of Star Wars

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I recently purchased the Japanese reissued Laserdisc versions of the Making Of Star Wars, TESB, ROTJ & Making Of A Saga. I am currently finding the best way of transferring these to DVD and I'd thought I'd share the process with you just in case anyone has some useful input. After tinkering with Dazzle Hollywood Bridge & WinVCR (the discs are NTSC so I can't use my PAL DV cam) I am using Virtualdub capturing via my Leadtek TI4200 VIVO using S-Video for the picture and the audio comes via the Digital Out of my Laserdisc (Pioneer CLD-2950) into my Creative Live! Drive II. I capture 720x480, 29.97 fps, uncompressed (!) AVI (for the best quality) with 48,000 16 Bit stereo sound. I only manage to capture 3-4 minutes before there is a dropped frame but each segment I eventually patch together in Cinema Craft Encoder when I come to encode it to MPEG-2. I'm doing my first encode of Making of SW at the moment so I'll let you know the results. Does anyone know how to avoid any frame droppage or improve on the method I'm using)?

[musher70]

let us know how it goes, cause i use almost the same
setup, though its gonna get kinda HUGE, at like 150g's
but ok, try anyway, you might try the huffy codec...

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Encoded. at 9800 CBR just to test. The final encode will be 9 pass VBR, 9800 MAX, 9800 Av, 2000 min. The CBR encode looks good.
The file is 60GB uncompressed.

Does anyone know if a hard drive with an 8mb memory will be any better for capturing?

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Here's a little taster!

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Guess what. Audio synch problems. I'm wondering that if i get the video without a frame drop and capture the audio via Firewire I'll get better sync.

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SUCCESS! (I think).
I moved over to using Virtualdub_Sync which corrects audio sync on the fly. It's very hit and miss but it's near enough for what i needed to edit. I used Adobe Premiere to bump the audio a frame or two whichever way it needed to go (I used Premiere as I could check the video and audio on the fly and it locked the audio to the video.

So after watching the program about 8 times over the weekend and tearing my hair out I think i've got it. I've burnt it to DVDR via DVDMaestro and Nero and my new soundtrack seems to be sync.

Technically the DVD is as follows:

Source Video -
Uncompressed (54GB) .avi @ 720 x 480 (no frames dropped) 29.97 fps captured from Japanese Laserdisc 1995 reissue.

Source Audio -
Uncompressed 48000 16 Bit Mono PCM .wav file from same laserdisc captured via Optical out on Laserdisc player to Optical in on Creative Live! Drive II.

Encoded Video -
CCE Encoded 9-Pass VBR (9400 AV, 2000 MIN, 9400 MAX)
No filters

Encoded Audio -
Sonic Foundry Soft Encoded .ac3 file (320 kbps, Mono)

All muxed and chaptered on DVDMaestro.

If anyone has any suggestions to improve any of the above please let me know

[spiderman2k1]

The way I would do it is use a Dazzle 2 captrue card if you need to know if Dazzle 2 will work on your mother board go to www.dazzlegeek.com cap at 90000 CBR mpeg2 then edit it with MPEG2VCR to clean up the first clip's that might have the laser disc saying playing or some thing like that then make the DVD it will be bigger then 4.3gig's but use DVD2ONE to make it fit on one DVD-R or split it on two DVD-R's

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I've got a Dazzle Hollywood Bridge but capturing to DV from an NTSC laserdisc results in some DV artifacting beleive it or not. What I would love is an analogue/digital capture card with built in optical audio in and audio lock. Does this exist?