authoring from laserdisc to dvd question

[mazinz]

hey i was wondering if any of you have tried this with certain laserdisc titles

As most people know, when it came to certain special edition laserdiscs (such as the boxed set for alien, the abyss, etc) their was a huge amount of text material that was only viewable by using the "step" function on your laserdisc remote, unfortunetly a good majority of that is not on their dvd counterparts.

If you hit the play button instead, it made the text zip across the screen a zillion miles an hour because each text page was an actual frame on the laserdisc.

now my test was to take all of this text footage and make dvds from it. Naturally doing each text page as its own menu/still to relink, would make anyone go completely insane

so i took it one step further. I just recorded the text flying by the screen when i hit the play button. I then used this as my video clip for authoring. To view this on dvd, all you would have to do is use the dvd's "step" function to view the pages again. Most dvd remotes/players have this function (although i noticed that the panny recorder deck dmr-hs2 does not).

I made 2 test. One was the japanese godzilla raids again laserdisc. This had over 2000 stills on it. But upon recording it, i noticed that every
now and then a frame would get skipped. Example the photos on the laser were numbered, so it would go like 20-25, skip 26 and then go to 27. No idea as to why.

however i then tried a criterion laserdisc (tale of hoffmann) and the photo gallery at the end of it worked fine. All of the pics were retained and worked great once authored.
I used the panny deck to record (ram) the test and used the pc (copied to my hard drive) for playback, etc

it still did not make sense though why one laser worked fine and the other did not. I was wondering if any of you have tried this yet? You could literally fit quite a number of those great laserdisc supplements onto one dvd this way.
----ok enough rambling for now---

[Skynet107]

I've done this myself a few times. I never had the problem you describe though. What happens when you view the original capture in something like virtualdub? Are all the frames actually there?

What I did capture the video, then exported the capture as an image sequence from Adobe Premiere. I then used the images to author a slideshow in DVD-LAB, setting each frame to 255 seconds. Worked great.

As for The Abyss I have it both on Laser Disc and DVD. I once attempted to re-author the disc with the extra stuff from the Laser Disc but gave up the project was too complex.

[mazinz]

yea that godzilla disc definitely had the frame skipped (it happend twice on that one). I double checked the actual laser to make sure that they numbered them correctly (which they did).

I used mpeg2vcr to do a frame by frame and it still had the missing frames. I will try it again using my capture card and see if that helps at all. I also have a higher-end laserdisc player my friend gave to me and i can try it in that one. Perhaps the actual disc player was skipping the frame when the play button was pushed?

Quite a few variables i will have to try out.

exporting to an image sequence was a very good idea, maybe i will try that out. I do not use dvd lab, but 255 is considered infinite correct? So to go to the next frame they would hit the next/previous button right? I ususally use dvdmaestro for things like that, but sometimes its just plain over kill.

[Skynet107]

255=infinite yes. A slideshow in DVD-Lab is just a movie using still images. Each image is a chapter. This limits you to 99 chapters per movie so I split the images into several movies if I need to.

It's funny to me how some laser disc titles had more features than the DVD version.

[mazinz]

why i never thought of that to begin with (well in the case of the abyss, a project like that can be very intimidating). In maestro i tell it to set stills to 255, and then just drop them all on the video line (beats the old method of making each still a menu item instead). Not sure how it will treat each one (i may have to assign it as a chapter) but we will see

[digitalfreaknyc]

anyone ever figured out an easier way of doing this? i've been making my own version of the Se7en Criterion Laserdisc and wanted to import all the photo galleries.

Should I just press "play" and capture it that way?