Newbie needs help with my old laser discs. Thank you.

[Jesone]

I am brand new to DVD burning so please forgive my ignorance. I just purchased an HP m1264n computer with a DVD burner. The first thing I wanted to do was to archive an old laser disc I have of Stevie Nicks's music videos. It is not available on DVD. I hooked up my laser disc player through the S-VHS connector and recorded the laser disc onto my hard drive using Intervideo WinDVD Creator. I burned a DVD using the highest quality setting but I was a little disappointed with the quality. There seems to be some distortion and the DVD is not as clear as the burned DVD. Is this normal or do I need better quality hardware/software. I did a couple of captures to try and give an example of the problem. Any advice or assitance is appreciated. Thanks for the help. Jesone

[Jesone]

Sorry I made an error in posting the photo comparision. Here is my second attempt.

[Jesone]

Another possibility.

http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/jesone_1/album?.dir=/fc7b

[GreyDeath]

I'm not familiar with your system, but first of all, try to get the same frames to compare the 2. Even though it's from the same scenes, there will be difference in lighting, shadows, etc.

From your Burned DVD Captures, it almost looks like you're not on a key frame. Is the whole video like this? Is the frame rate on your captures the same as the project you're making?

Other than that, I don't see any major artifacting or blockyness, so at least you have that going for you.

[smearbrick1]

Just for future reference:

If you are referring to S-VHS as the S-VIDEO connector...

It's S-VIDEO, not S-VHS.

[vhelp]

Based on the pics you posted above ...

It looks like you ran it through a IVTC or de-interlace filter.
That would account of the DVD pic above the Laserdisc pics being
blurry or distorted (blended) etc.

FWIW mentioning here ...

Concerts are pure interlace videos. That means that you should not
try to IVTC nor reduce the frame rate (fps) but rather, keep the
frame rate where it is, at 29.970 fps, and proceed to encode it with
interlace ticked on.. assuming you are using TMPGenc later on. I
can not speak for the other software and the settings to use because
I do not own any of them.

Also, I'm not familiar with those capture device you mentioned. So
I can't offer suggestions on settings, for those items.

Other thoughts ...

Hopefully, you are not capturing these Laserdisc's to an MPEG that is
real-time capture and encode. These types of methods do not always
work very well, and are usually for those that just want to *quickly*
archive or capture and burn to DVD, and play quickly in their DVD
set-top players.. yippy, I did it.. kinds of peoples

It may not be easy to get the best quality transfers from Laserdisc
players until you have mastered the things of video processes, etc.
As such, *good* quality might be obtain if you run many thourgh tests
scenarios. Later, you choose the best all around quality from the method(s)
you used that produced the work.

It's not easy for me to jot down here the best method. I don't think
there is one, because no one user has the same exact setup as another
user.., add to that, the skills to go with it.

I'm afraid that in your current situation and knowledge, your best
approach to this project, is to just capture it to an AVI file, and
encode it as Interlace. You can use TMPGenc for this method.

Below are my suggestions for TMPGenc setup. Feel free to make any
experimental changes as you see fit. But, the ones I use below should
work without any issue when completed to an MPEG-2 video. In all
probablity, it will be pretty slow. But TMPGenc is known for this.
And, I still use it over other, faster MPEG encoders.

For now, this should get your going with TMPGenc

.
.

Setting up TMPGenc for Laserdisc encoding of pure interlace source ...

** Video Tab: [720 x 480 ]
** Video Tab: frame rate: [29.970 ]
** Video Tab: rate control: [CBR]
** Video Tab: bitrate: [9000 ]
** Video Tab: VBV buffer: [224 ]
** Video Tab: encode mode: [Interlace ]
** Video Tab: DC component: [9 ]
** Video Tab: Motion search: [Highest quality (very slow) ]
** .
** (o) System (Video+Audio) -- will give you an .MPG file.
.. or ..
** (o) ES (Video+Audio) -- will give you an .M2V and MP2 file for VOB authoring.
** .
** Advanced Tab: Video source type: [Interlace ]
** Advanced Tab: Field order: [(field A) if DV source, use (field B) ]
** Advanced Tab: source aspect ratio: [4:3 Display ]
** Advanced Tab: video arrange: [full screen ]
** .
** GOP structure Tab: leave alone
** .
** Quantize Tab: leave alone
** .
** Audio Tab: can use 192k, 224k or higher audio
** .
** System Tab: Stream type: [MPEG-2 Program (VBR) ] -- for DVD compliance.

-vhelp 3632