What Works Best Going From VHS To DVD??????

[bht42]

I'm going crazy. Too many choices to make. I want to put my VHS tapes (recorded in Hi-Fi SP) onto DVD with at least the same quality picture as the VHS tape.
I currently have Pinnacle Studio 8 which uses a DC10Plus capture card, P4 2.6Ghz, 1024Ram, 80 GHD and 120GHD (used for video only), SoundBlaster Platinum soundcard.
I'm going from the 'video out' jack of vcr to the capture card, and audio from the vcr to the SoundBlaster card
I also have Nero 6, but it won't recognize the Pinnacle DC10Plus capture card. I use Nero for burning my dvds.
I'm not satisfied with the video quality of the dvds (picture is a little grainy, colors faded just a little).
What can I do and/or get to produce at least the same quality picture of my VHS tapes to dvd? I'm not wealthy, so be easy.

Thanks,
Bruce

[andydd]

My Panasonic DMRE30 works best, I press Play on my VHS and then press record on my Panny !

[housepig]

use software such as VirtualDub or VirtualVCR. Capture your source as an AVI using Huffyuv or MJPEG compression.

convert that avi to mpeg-2 with an encoder other than the one built into Nero.

Nero is a great burning application, but they've kludged in capture, editing and encoding software over the years - you are usually better off using dedicated software for each step, rather than an "all in one" application.

for more info, check the How To: guides at above left, for Capture, Convert & Author.

[macm]

Check Lordsmurf.com guides and explanations. It is a good place to begin. Capping with best quality will produce the same VHS quality, no matter if using filters or stuffs like that. Actually, if you want to backup your VHS's, add menus, chapters, forget about standalone recorders. They are not able to do that. Also consider buying a MPEG-2 cap device (or card) like ATI AIW or any other out there, if your source is not that bad and you do not plan to edit it hard, go directly to MPEG-2, it's worth the quality and time.

[qpskfec]

+RW standalone recorders will allow you to do limited editng. (except for Sony, which has removed some +RW functionality)

You can take any title and divide it into multiple titles that can be renamed.

Remove and insert chapter marks. Hide/unhide chapters.

If you only need simple editng, a standalone works fine.

For more extensive editing, I use the standalone recorder to record a dvd, then insert chapter marks at edit points. Put disc in PC and use DVDecrypter to rip only the chapters I want. Load into DVDMF, burn new DVD. This avoids the time needed to reencode.

[chaseru]

I'm not satisfied with the video quality of the dvds (picture is a little grainy, colors faded just a little). What can I do and/or get to produce at least the same quality picture of my VHS tapes to dvd? I'm not wealthy, so be easy.

You may need to use filters in VirtualDub to remove the video noise which can cause the "grainy" picture. I had good success transferring VHS to DVD using Jim Casaburi's 2d and Temporal cleaners.