Best practice for VHS to DVD?

[dooku]

Hello,

I have captured a 2 hour homemovie from VHS tape to (dv camcorder pastrough) to harddisk with pinnacle studio and ended up with about 20Gb of avi files.

Then I made a movie with pinnacle studio and now have about a dvd size mpeg file.

If I understand correctly, when I burn the mpeg file to dvd and delete the avi's then I can not edit the movie anymore? Is this correct, and what should I do, can't keep all those Gb's on harddisk for ever when I need to capture more from VHS tape.

Regards
dooku

[jetfan]

You are correct, once you delete the files, you will Not be able to edit them any further.If HD space is a factor, and you have a DVD burner, you could burn the original files onto disc, it will take 4 or 5 discs, but even if you were to pay a dollar a disc, that's really not that expensive. Then you could edit to your hearts desire at any time in the future!

[jetfan]

Also, if you delete the AVI's make sure that you either save the project file on your HD, they are usually 100kb or less or back that up also on one of the discs, otherwise you will have to start from scratch every time. Studio will ask for a new path for each file that you moved, but it shouldn't take you that long to change the source path.

[Capmaster]

Hello,

I have captured a 2 hour homemovie from VHS tape to (dv camcorder pastrough) to harddisk with pinnacle studio and ended up with about 20Gb of avi files.

Then I made a movie with pinnacle studio and now have about a dvd size mpeg file.

If I understand correctly, when I burn the mpeg file to dvd and delete the avi's then I can not edit the movie anymore? Is this correct, and what should I do, can't keep all those Gb's on harddisk for ever when I need to capture more from VHS tape.

Regards
dooku

You can still edit DVDs by copying the VOBs to HD and editing. There are a number of editors that will open VOBs.

But you run risks doing that. Any time you open, edit and reencode a file you could be introducing errors. A good rule of thumb is to change the material as few times as possible.

Some folks like to capture, demux, manipulate, edit, remux, author and then burn. My policy has always been to keep the number of changes to a minimum. I've been burned too many times "playing around" with files

[dooku]

Thank you all for answering my question, appreciate it!

Regards
Dooku

[gshelley61]

You can frame accurately edit MPEG2 without re-encoding (Womble MPEG Video Wizard and MPEG-VCR do this), but only simple cutting and joining. The edited MPEG2 can then be authored (menus and chapter stops added) and burned to DVD without re-encoding, as well.

If you want to use fancy transitions, add music and graphics, etc. to the MPEG2 video, then re-encoding (quality loss) will be necessary. AVI files are much better for that purpose.

[Capmaster]

You can frame accurately edit MPEG2 without re-encoding (Womble MPEG Video Wizard and MPEG-VCR do this), but only simple cutting and joining. The edited MPEG2 can then be authored (menus and chapter stops added) and burned to DVD without re-encoding, as well.

If you want to use fancy transitions, add music and graphics, etc. to the MPEG2 video, then re-encoding (quality loss) will be necessary. AVI files are much better for that purpose.

Excellent point.

MPEG2 is not a format that's conducive to editing. It's more of an output format than an input format. DVD files with the .VOB extension are actually MPEG2 files.

Editing MPEGs is tricky, and until the appearance of the aforementioned frame-accurate editors, editing MPEGs frequently introduced errors like sync problems. Now we can edit MPEGs with more confidence, but because the structure of MPEG2s is so complex, it's not wise to make it a habit.

AVIs lend themselves much better to heavy editing. They have no "I", "B" or "P" frames to consider. Once editing is finished, they can be encoded to MPEG prior to authoring. This method yields the best results