Capturing/Converting/Burning Problems

[Escher0]

I'm having problems getting captured video (from VHS or TV) to DVD. No matter what I try to do, the movie comes out bad quality on the DVD. Even after all my reading articles and guides, the best I got was still a little blurry and hard on the eyes.

I'm capturing into Premiere 6.5 with a Canopus ADVC-100. I go into Premiere because I need to edit the clips. I then export using LSX Encoder plugin for Premiere straight to DVD standard video. I don't think the problem is in the authoring or burning as that doesn't touch the video right?

I think the problem might be in the capture quality because LSX is pretty straight-foward on the DVD standards except I was a little uncertain as to what interlacing settings to use. I think I figured out the interlacing by making a test DVD just to compare effects on the video.

Please let me know what I'm doing wrong or what I can do to improve quality. Any information would be very helpful. Thanks.

[housepig]

hard to say - "bad quality" doesn't really translate - can you get some screen grabs and give us examples?

especially if you can grab a frame from the source, and then the same frame after you encoded, so we can see what's bad.

but yeah, the authoring and burning stages shouldn't affect the video quality, unless your burner is set to reencode files with it's own encoder.

[Escher0]

I'll work on getting a screen grab tonight. Whats the best way to do that? Take a screen shot? or export a frame?

[Tommyknocker]

Have PowerDVD or WinDVD screen capture. If you have a website, you can give us the link.

[housepig]

depends on your system - exporting a frame is usually more certain, since some screen-grab software will just show you the player with a black screen, due to the way the video card handles video files.

[Escher0]

Sorry for the delay, but I've got some screengrabs now. I can post more if its needed. I posted shots of the raw capturre and the compressed MPEG. I exported these shots out of Premiere.

Warning: Each shot is about a meg.

This shot should be pretty detailed but its all blurry.
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~bpilnick/DVDShots/CapturedAVI1.bmp
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~bpilnick/DVDShots/DVDMpeg1.bmp

This shot shows what happens when the camera pans past something or something moves quickly. That blurring is present every few frames.
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~bpilnick/DVDShots/CapturedAVI2.bmp
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~bpilnick/DVDShots/DVDMpeg2.bmp

Just showing the overall "bad-quality"
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~bpilnick/DVDShots/CapturedAVI3.bmp
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~bpilnick/DVDShots/DVDMpeg3.bmp

After looking at frame comparisions, it looks like the loss in the capture. Any suggestions?