Pinnacle Studio 9 VHS to DVD experiences

[youcanjive]

Hi all.

I spent the weekend testing Studio 9 as an experiment. My main use was capturing from old vhs video tapes for the purpose of making dvds.

This is what I experienced...

-Video capture from newer, stable tapes was excellent.

-Video capture from older tapes with a bit of noise was poor (and let's face it...most of us who are transferring from vhs to dvd are using old tapes that we want to bring into the new millenium). The out-of-synch problem I've read so much about reared its ugly, ugly head. My computer came with a basic DVD authoring program called "Power Producer" which handles older tapes MUCH better than Studio 9 (S9)...so I used that instead for those ones and imported them into S9. A simple solution...but poor reflection on S9.

-The menu editor is excellent...however...

-Adding video frames into the menu buttons in S9 is a farce. Without fail several of the buttons would drop the selected frame and appear as black buttons on the burnt disc despite looking fine in the S9 preview window. I was able to get around this by opening the button in Photoshop and editing the grabbed frame into them...then reinserting them into the menu. A good, reliable solution that gave me the control over the buttons that S9 claims to provide...but doesn't. It's absurd that I would have to do this !

-How on Earth do you link from one menu to the next ? OMG...this one gave me anxiety attacks. I cannot see anything in the manual that explains how to achieve this. Just dragging the menu into the timeline does NOT automatically link the menus. I had 13 chapters in all and in the end had to place the thumbnails for ALL of them on one menu. When I tried to spread them over 2 menus...the "next" button on M1 was useless...a dead link...and wouldn't even appear in the preview window. I'm sure there is a solution for this...but I'm not stupid and the fact that how to acheive this isn't made clear is very poor. I'd sincerely appreciate any advise on this one.

-Being in Australia I'm using the PAL system. I'm assuming my DVDs are being burnt in the PAL format, but I can't find anything that tells me that or gives me the option of burning an NTSC disc (for example). Is this an option in S9 ?

Any feedback sincerely welcomed and appreciated )

Cheers,
Luke

[KaptinK]

I have had a lot of problems with DVD-Studio as have many others. I bought this and have wasted a lot of time on it - but it can work sometimes. Best left alone, a real time waster.

So my own experience has got me to this point, and it really does work. First, the capture - I have a Panasonic DVD-RAM recorder - the E50 which is dirt cheap now. It records (captures) my VHS tapes beautifully, and my VHS player is a Panasonic that fortunately has noise reduction and TBC. I then transport the DVD-RAM disk to my PC where I can now use a TmpGenc product to author the DVD (DVD-Author is the product - without re-encoding).
For camcorder use, I capture using DV-Studio (this bit of it doesn't seem to crash !!) and then encode the full AVI using TmpGenc Plus 2.5 for input to DVD-Author.

I actually write the DVD with Nero (phew !! so many products) as DVD-Author locked up on me for some reason.

Hope this helps a bit !