Laser Disc capture

[MetaPhaze]

I have lots and lots of great Laser Discs, I personally want to convert them to DVD for long gevity purposes. I would also like to give back to the community who has helped me so much. I would love to share what I have but I need a bit of help getting it captured. I have a ATI VE Capture card, the cheap tv tuner one (I think thats the problem) and I've been using the ATI software to capture it to mpeg-2. The capture looks the same as the source when its being played on the PC which looks really crappy compared to when its on the big screen. It looks like there are tons of lines going through the picture. What do you recommend? Are there any good guides on capturing this kind of material? Please help!

PS: Capture is comming through composite video, I don't have a LD player with S-Video

[ktnwin]

Since your laser disc player only support normal composite video out, it is no different than a normal VCR player. You can look into how to transfer VHS tapes to DVD and follow the exact same steps.
I have used neoDVD with the AverDVD card (combo $40) and convert lots of VHS tapes to DVD quickly with very good quality (as played on 65" HDTV screen, not just PC)
You may want to look into it.

[FulciLives]

Sorry to say but the ATI VE Capture card is GARBAGE.

I would try getting another capture card. A lot of people on this forum have good results with the ASUS TV TUNER and I've read many people like ktnwin who have good luck with the AverDVD card.

Try using the HuffyUV codec for your capture.

For converting to DVD I suggest you try TMPGEnc. There is a demo version. The full version is not very expensive.

NeoDVD is basically a "newbie" type product. Very easy to use and "decent" quality but not the greatest.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[spiderman2k1]

IF I was you get a Dazzle 2 but first go to www.dazzlegeek.com to see if it will work on your mother board. You can get a dazzle 2 at http://www.shopharmony.com/ capture at CBR but in the dazzle 2 you just turn off VB that's CBR capture at the hight bitrate you can the files' will not fit on DVD-R butn make the DVD on the hard drive then use www.dvd2one.com or www.dvdshrink.org to make it fit they will look just like the laser disc you captured

[FulciLives]

IF I was you get a Dazzle 2 but first go to www.dazzlegeek.com to see if it will work on your mother board. You can get a dazzle 2 at http://www.shopharmony.com/ capture at CBR but in the dazzle 2 you just turn off VB that's CBR capture at the hight bitrate you can the files' will not fit on DVD-R butn make the DVD on the hard drive then use www.dvd2one.com or www.dvdshrink.org to make it fit they will look just like the laser disc you captured

Funny as I've heard mostly bad things about Dazzle products.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[housepig]

I'll second ktnwin here - I have the Aver EZ DVDmaker card, and a LD player I got off eBay for $20, composite out only.

all the stuff I've captured off laser looks stunning. I would capture to avi and encode separately though, as on my machine I get much better quality and much better audio sync if I capture as an avi with either Huffy or MJPEG codec. (I like iuVCR for capture).

and it's an inexpensive solution - I got mine for $50 at a CompUSA, if I had waited until one of their periodic sales I could have had it for $10 after rebates.

[andkiich]

Houspig has the right idea. I can't tell you the night and day difference that a Laserdisc source has over an VCR I've seen captured from.

I've no experience with the capture card you have, but I'm using the ATI AIW 7500 Radeon and it was one of the best investments that I have ever made.

Since your capturing process is going straight to MPEG2, you're missing a lot of quality benefits. I capture uncompressed AVI video/audio and then convert to MPEG2 VBR with TMPGENc.

Give that process a try and you'll be happy with the results. There are a few guides on this sight for capturing and converting LD to DVD, make sure you give them a look as well.

[MetaPhaze]

Thank you guys so much for your help. I went out and bought a Dazzle external USB 2.0 device gonna give that a shot. I think I'm gonna have problems with the AR though cuz I've already ran into that with the ATI TV VE Card.

[MetaPhaze]

No *REAL* Software seems to work with this Dazzle 150 Hi-Speed. The only software that appears to work suprise suprise is the proprietary software that came with it and its garbage. I can't encode the way I want to. I wanted to do the Huffyuv to MPEG2 but it seems the software won't work with Huffyuv correctly or any real codec other then the VCD/SVCD/DVD Template codecs that are poorly configured in my oppinion in this software.

[monoxide77]

if you're serious about DVD backup of LDs, i'd get a Canopus ADVC-100 and a really good LD player possibly a Pioneer Elite circa '92 - '98. Don't go all out and buy an LD/DVD combo player though, thinking you can use the component outputs, because those only work for the DVDs. The ADVC-100 works great and is easy to use. the only weakness it has is animation. especially where reds and blues mix. the colors seem to bleed together. just my 2 cents.

[turk690]

No-one mentioned capturing with a DV camcorder through FireWire, which is what I do: Pioneer CLD1080 LD player, Sony DCRTRV120 D8 camcorder, ADSTech Pyro FireWire card, Premiere 6.5. There will ALWAYS be issues with ANY analogue capture card, no matter, it seems, how fast your PC/HDD is, how big the system memory is, how frequently one has tweaked/defraged the whole shebang. This is the best solution I've found so far (for my PC, D850 mobo, 2.0GHzP4, 512MB RDRAM, 120GB 7200rpm WD HDD): to get the actual A-to-D conversion OUT of the PC. This is done by the D8 camcorder in its E-to-E mode (to allay anyone's fears that it's unnecessarily being worn down) where it's just powered on, sitting there, taking the analogue outputs from the LD player and relaying it via FireWire to my HDD where it becomes DV AVI. The DV AVI codec (MainConcept) is great in that unlike most other proprietary AVI codecs out there (that ship with a multitude of analogue capture cards, where you have to wrestle with a lot of confusing settings, resolutions, audio bitrate captures, etc.) it has only ONE resolution for NTSC and that is 720x480, which also happens to very conveniently be the top (MP@ML) resolution required for DVD, ditto for the audio as well 48K/16b/stereo. After the capture in Premiere, I minimally edit the timeline contents before giving it off to VideoServer plugin and TMPGenc. If the movie is short enough (less than 90mins) I can still use PCM audio and the default CQ 65 in TMPGenc to make it fit onto one DVD-R. If not I configure TMPGenc to output elementary streams *.m2v and *.mp2 (the latter at either 192, 224, 0r 256kb/s; despite the Dolby Digital scare, ALL of the *.mp2 audio NTSC DVDs I've created play well on all my DVD settops). DVD-Lab is used for authoring (including fabulous menus and chapter stops). It could be that the Premiere/ADSTech Firewire card package is expensive ($260) compared with the other mentioned methods and this is on top of the camcorder (~$450) cost, but I can very well use these items for other capturing/editing situations aside from LD transfer to DVD. Besides, if like MetaPhaze, I had lots and LOTS of LDs, I'd give them star treatment like this.