Problems with VHS to DVD

[Livo]

Hi there I am very new to DVD authoring, but I decided to splash out and build myself a decent system around the RTX100 to convert my old VHS tapes to DVD, a nice hobby I thought. Until I began. I capture and edit in Premiere, fine, export it via Matrox Realt Ime Export to Disk, fine, I build my project in DVDit, although the finished article is 800mb too big, so I put in a custom build size, fine. Now here is where I improvise a little. I now squash the finished article to under 4.7gb using DVD to 1, all seems well. I then burn it to DVD-r (Ritek, works fine with the dvd writer in work) using my Pioneer DVR-105 and Nero 5.10.20, all seems great. it plays on my DVD player ok but occassionally the video freezes on a frame, whilst the audio continues unabaited, and if I try to play it on a PS2, forget it, the picture goes green and pixelated, a la 'The Matrix' and crashes the machine!!!!! Now do any of you guys have any advice on what I am doing wrong? I would be eternally grateful if anyone could help me, I am tearing my hair out, many thanks in advance, Mike

PC Spec:
ASUS P4C800 Deluxe
P4 2.8ghz 800fsb
1024mb Corsair DDR453 PC3500
1 x 120gb Western Digital 7200, split 40/80
Matrox G550 Milennium
Matrox RTX100 Xtreme
Creative Sound Blaster Platinum
Pioneer DVR-105
Sony 52x CD-Rom
Windows XP (Service pack 1)

[Tommyknocker]

Sorry, man, I capture my VHS with Video Studio, edit, then burn to DVD. The only other program involved is maybe PowerDVD or WinDVD to watch it.

[mkelley]

You're going to have to start Troubleshooting 101.

First of all, create a project that *isn't* 800 mb too big. Eliminate your "squashing" and see if that disk plays fine. If so, then you've nailed down your problem.

If that still doesn't work, try encoding your project with another encoder -- I use Premiere's 6.5 MainConcept encoder without problems, but TMPGEnc will allow you a limited free trial of their much slower but fairly good quality encoder. If your disks work then, then you also have figured out what's wrong.

Finally, if you *still* can't get it working I'd try another authoring program -- DVDLab has a fully-functioning 30 day trial and is a far superior program to what you're using anyway. By then you should well know what's going on with your work flow.

[pijetro]

The simplest fix first, would be to get the bitrate calculator, and decide the bitrate from the beginning before encoding.......Why recompress to fit, when you could have done that correctly in the beginning??
Your DVD to 1(?) is probably the cause. It seems to be the odd man out!!!!!

Good luck!!!

[txpharoah]

Alright, I'm officially jealous. I want a Matrox RTX100.

Anyway, I think your problem is bad media. Try burning on a high-quality disc. What were you using?

Also try another player. DVD-ROM on computers are known to freeze up like that, as are some standalone players.

If that's not it, you've got to troubleshoot. Invest in DVD-RW discs.

First try a small 10-minute movie. See how that goes, or if the problem persists...

Next RETRY the same too-big DVD from your first test, but this time, run it through DVDshrink. See how that goes, or if the problem persists...

CUT OFF part of the video from the first test, thereby NOT shrinking it to fit, and burn. See how that goes, or if the problem persists...

Then make ANOTHER video from ANOTHER capture, and make it too big, and shrink with DVD2one, and try again. See how that goes, or if the problem persists...

Come back here again and let us know...

One of these tests should generate your answer!

Also look at the MATROX forums, as they are excellent.

And one more thing... how much $$$ did that system set you back? It's really nice, better than what I have at home, and maybe even better than what I've got sitting on my other desk here at work!

[mkelley]

Alright, I'm officially jealous. I want a Matrox RTX100.

Geeze, just go ahead and buy one. I found them new with Premiere 6.5 for less than $1K (that's about half the price of most of our studio capture cards and they didn't come with any software :>).

I thought you did this stuff for a living? The Matrox is pretty cheap compared to nearly anything else you can buy for broadcast work. Although quite frankly I don't know what it would give you that firewire capture wouldn't.

[pijetro]

I don't know if it's the same as the next model up (RT1000?), but I would think that the main advantage is working in Premiere, and doing realtime transitions (no rendering) with their codec, software and hardware. After that's all said and done, if you break out to the TV with the same card (sweeet), you'll see realtime encoding in action.
It's as fast as drag, render, encode, burn, in a time that would allow us hobbyists to maybe make some money off of this stuff for once

I too am jealous.....

Cheap, but jealous........

[troyvcd1]

I dont think I would of split my hard drive.

[Livo]

Many, many thanks to all you guys who replied to me, last nite I re-encoded with a lower, constant, bit rate, rather than the default higher vbr, I am gonna test after and let you know what happens. As for the price of the system, I built it myself and the following are the prices for the various bits;

ASUS P4C800 Deluxe: £133
Pentium 4 2.8ghz 800fsb £223
Corsair PC3500 DDR453 512mb x 2 £218
Western Digital 120gb HDD 7200 £99
Panasonic DVR-105 £133
Matrox G550 Millenium £74.25
Matrox RTX100 £800
Case with 500Watt PSU £80

Total (ulp) £1760.25

So there you are, first time I've added it up, all on a credit card of course, but go to PC World and see what you get for that amount of cash. Will let you all know tonite how I get on with the problem and, once again, thanks for everyone's input, Mike

PS I too have concerns over the partitioned drive and so am going to reformat it to one 120gb drive once this project is done an d buy another 120gb as my A/V drive.

[mkelley]

I don't know if it's the same as the next model up (RT1000?), but I would think that the main advantage is working in Premiere, and doing realtime transitions (no rendering) with their codec, software and hardware. After that's all said and done, if you break out to the TV with the same card (sweeet), you'll see realtime encoding in action.
It's as fast as drag, render, encode, burn, in a time that would allow us hobbyists to maybe make some money off of this stuff for once

I too am jealous.....

Cheap, but jealous........

Um, with Premiere 6.5 you have real time preview of your transitions, so a real time card isn't the big deal it used to be. Since MainConcept can render in near real time I'm just not so sure these cards hold the same attraction they did back in the day.

We spent around $2.5K for each of our real time broadcast cards and even with the high end ($2K) NLE editing software they don't work appreciably better than Premiere with just firewire capture. About the only thing that's different is they scrub faster on the timeline, but I've gotten used to the lag in Premiere as I scrub around and the key controls in Premiere are so much better I find I'm much more productive. I hardly ever fire up one of the studio machines anymore (at this point I'd sell them off but I don't think I'd get much :>)

This stuff has just gotten very cheap and very good -- which is a good thing for us all.

[pijetro]

Yes, but is realtime preview the same as realtime conversion?!?!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Premiere's rendering requires your CPU to do all the crunching, whereas the cards like Matrox do it on the fly with their own proprietary hardware.

I'm not very knowledgable on the subject, but I'm assuming that once you get into the multiple audio and video layers, the Maxtor would start to excell.

Perhaps with the faster CPU's , yes, rendering is getting faster, and hopefully the cards will fall in price, but the extra options, speed and encoding the Matrox spits out is pretty impressive. ....
Perhaps this is the reason for bundled packages of software and hardware nowadays.. Who in their right mind would go and spend $650 for Premiere, when you can get it for half that price, or even a quarter???

[mkelley]

As I said, using MainConcept for MPEG rendering is near real time, so yes, in that case it is the same (although I will grant you that multiple effects layers can slow this down -- but it seems to me that even the Matrox is limited to two or three real time layers. Besides, such heavy effects are far better done in After Effects, which does real time previews on my CPU of just about anything I throw at it). Multiple audio layers aren't a problem for just about anyone's system nowadays, so it's a non-issue.

But we're far afield here -- I'll leave it to another thread if someone wants to start a comparison of Real Time cards. My overall impression is that CPU and software has outdistanced the need for them.

[txpharoah]

Geeze, just go ahead and buy one. I found them new with Premiere 6.5 for less than $1K (that's about half the price of most of our studio capture cards and they didn't come with any software :>). I thought you did this stuff for a living? The Matrox is pretty cheap compared to nearly anything else you can buy for broadcast work. Although quite frankly I don't know what it would give you that firewire capture wouldn't.

1. Work pays for work stuff. I'm not self-employed.
2. My ATI cards are great for the freelance and personal stuff.
3. I do well for myself, but don't have $1K laying around for my "toys".
4. I wouldn't have a good answer for my daughter when it comes time to go to college, and I respond, "Sorry honey, I had to buy that video card that was obsolete six months after it came out, so you just go work at Taco Bell, alright?" That money is in a better place. Not that it is only $1K in a college fund, but you get the idea. Better places to use it.

I'm saving for a nice Christmas purchase, but not decided what it will be yet, and there are domestic politics to consider.

And Livo, good choice on removing the HD partition and adding a capture drive! That will help things in general.

[mkelley]

Ah, you're right, then. I remember when I was your age -- things were quite a bit different (as it turns out, my daughter decided she didn't *want* to go to college, and married young. So I had lots of money left over for my own toys :>).

As for the domestic politics (lovely choice of words): I totally understand. If there's only one piece of advice I could give young folks when it comes to marriage, it's that when your wife's happy, you're happy <g>.

(But truly, I don't think you're missing anything. I have all the toys, both because I owned the video business and because, well, I have a little money late in life, and the high end capture cards truly don't do anything more nowadays then good software and a fast machine can -- I still can't get over how good After Effects is, when we spent... I don't even want to go into how much money we've spent on special effects hardware generators).