VHS to DivX: did it by the book, got stuck, need advice.

[voelspriet]

Hi all,

I want to convert 50 VHS-tapes to my HD in DIVX 5.1 format (or DIVX 5.0). I thought I did it by the book. I said goodbye to my Pinnacle USB 2.0 converter (audio-sync problems) and bought the DataVideo DAC-100.

I started converting with Windows Moviemaker. But the DV-25 output couldn't be converted to DivX with my Dr DivX-package.

Then I used DV-Express. Ouch. Audio-sync problems....

So i bought Adobe Premier Pro 7. No sync problems. Phew. Great.. but not... Why? Well, 1 hrs of VHS-tape was almost 14 GIG on the HD. Adobe needed 5 hrs to put on HD (MPEG-2) and Dr DivX needed 10 hrs to convert it. 15 hrs of converting for 1 hrs of VHS, that's too much for me.

Two questions:

1. Make it so with Premiere Pro

I want to instruct Adobe Premiere Pro to produce a smaller AVI, but I am not sure how to do that. Any suggestions? Please be specific..

2. Alternatives?

But I would love to capture my VHS and export it right away into DivX 5.0 or higher. Unfortunately, Dr DivX doesn't support Firewire. Any suggestions for alternative software?

[bottle-necked]

Adobe is a little hard to use (get used to I suppose) but I believe it has the ability to capture in DV, then produce in DivX without much problems. For first attempts I'd use 'default' DivX settings and 1pass on some short clips. I'd also consider leaving the audio 'uncompressed' if you encounter errors or crashes (I crashed it big time). The audio can easily be process later in VirtualDub. I'd also consider disabling the DivX processing screen (in Settings). I've had that screen crash a few programs before.

I've never used Adobe Premier before but just exported a working DivX clip and only crashed the program once.

This would cut your time to encode down quite a bit.

Good luck.

[Gazorgan]

Premiere? Your brave, biggest learning curve of any product mentioned on theis site. And it doesn't do DivX does it? Your not using it to jsut capture are you???

Try IUVCR, free 30 day trial. Capture to MJPEG for video(it's still an AVI) and PCM for audio. Convert to DivX as usual. It's really not that hard.

Nowhere did you mention resolutions. VHS isn't anywhere close to DVD specs, so don't get cheeky and try to make a 720x480 DivX ( you can, but it's a 2 CDR minimum size, with 2 channel MP3 audio) full length feature.

[bobmeyer]

You could try Virtual VCR which is a FREE program.

[voelspriet]

Yep, I'm using Adobe Premiere just to capture. And then I use Dr DivX to get it in DivX 5.1 I noticed IUVCR supports Firewire, so that sounds good. Let me recap your suggestion, just to see if I follow the right procedure:

1. I convert the VHS-tape with IUVCR
2. I convert the AVI to 5.1 with Dr DivX
3. I burn the AVI's on my DVD's, which I can play on my DivX-player.

Correct?

Two more questions:

1. Resolution

Which resolution do I choose (input: VHS, output: AVI) inIUVCR?

2. Quality

Which quality do I choose (input: VHS output: AVI) in IUVCR?




I forgot one thing: I have a LiteOn DixX-DVD-player and a DVD-writer, so I don't need to put the AVI's on CD-R(W).

[bottle-necked]

By not needing to convert to MPEG for Dr.DivX will save you alot of time, but Adobe is hard to use and seems slower to me than most other programs(?), but it did do a DivX conversion from a captured file. I just captured the file, drag it to the timeline, then exported timeline to movie, then setup my DivX codec etc. First time I tried it the program crashed during encode and complained about my AC3 audio compression, so I just encoded audio uncompressed and everything went fine then. This was with the trial version 6 download and my first use. I think I need Premier for Dummies instead of Premier for Pros. haha