Okay, I really need some help....

[JLanphear]

Hey Everybody,

I'm really new to this whole video thing and I really need some help as my frustration level keeps growing. I have tried to read as much as I can, but I have had a hard time finding something specific to my needs. I know it's out there, but my lack of knowledge prevents me from finding it.

Anyway, all I am trying to do is capture a 25 minute video from a VHS tape and put it on either a VCD or an SVCD. If the VCD is capable of VHS quality video (which I read that it is) than that is fine by me.

I have tried several different programs...Adobe Premiere, MGI VideoWave, Vegas Video, and lastly Virtualdub to name a few.

I have an ATI All-in-Wonder Pro PCI 16mb capture card, and because of that I am forced to use my older computer because it is not compatible with my motherboard on my new system. The computer that I am using is a PIII 600 with 521mb of RAM, running Windows XP Proffesional. It's got a 30gb hard drive that has like 20gb of free space (7200rpm IDE).

I started with Premiere and I got no where...I dropped 40% of my frames and of course the video looked awful. I then moved to MGI VideoWave and was able to go without dropping any frames at 320x240 res. The problem was that I encoded it as an MPEG 2 file and when I went to burn it on Easy CD Creator I noticed that it doesn't support MPEG 2. So I changed my settings to have it saved as an MPEG 1 file and captured it again. I got it on a VCD and was not impressed with the quality. The image was very grainy and pixelized.

After doing some reading I found out that Nero supported MPEG 2 files so I got that and installed it on my system. When I went to burn the file I got and error saying that SVCD's do not support "streaming audio" or something like that. It asked me if I wanted to re-encode the file, but I read never to do that so I chose not to and gave up on that file.

I then started using Vegas Video to capture my file, but then once I got about 1/2 way in it stopped because I had a 4gb file. I couldn't figure out how to get it started again seamlessly so I gave up on that one too.

I was reading these forums again and noticed that a lot of people recommend VirtualDub so I downloaded that and tried it. I used one of the guides on this site saying how to capture high quality video with minimal frame loss. I changed all of my settings to match what the person was using and when I started to capture the video I was dropping a ton of frames.

I went back to the drawing board and tried to do some more reading, but I just can't find what I want. I tried to view Jamie's Guide for capturing on this site, but it's a geocities website that is always maxed out.

So basically I want to capture a 25 minute VHS tape to my computer so I can make a VHS quality CD out of it. My goal in this is to get it on VCD so I can distribute it that way because it's so much cheaper than a VHS tape. It's also a lot easier to reproduce.

If anybody can lead me to a step by step guide for doing something like this I would appreciate it. I don't know a lot about this stuff and without a good basis it's hard to read some of the guides. Maybe I'm dumb. I just want to know what to change the settings to so I can get a compatible file that is good quality on any given program.

Thank you all very much for reading.

-Josh

[Nelson37]

Try capping MPEG2, 720x480, 352x480, or 480x480, 6-12 bitrate, CBR, motion setting 99, cropped video, I-Frame only. Use Stinky's reg tool to set MMC quality to 6, on Profile set Motion Search paramaters to 128 and 64. Play with these settings to get 0 or very low frame drops.

Then - Demux video with TMPGenc, save audio as wave with Flask, create D2V file with DVD2AVI, open D2V file with MPEG2DEC.dll plugin in AVISYNTH, (Use IVTC also, if applicable), resize if necessary, open AVS file and WAVE in VDUB, edit, Frameserve to TMPGenc or CCE, do audio seperately, run Pulldown.exe on video file if IVTC was used, mux with BBmpeg, image with VCDIMAGER, burn the bin/cue file.

Capping MPG2 helps with framedrops and also gets around your HD space issue. The rest is a modification of the same procedure you would use with a DVD, except for the hard Telecine.

You're probably not ready for this, but neither was I when I started out. I have now used this procedure to create several hundred CVD and SVCD (which I would recommend over VCD), and the educational process was fun.