Am I doing this correctly? My VHS to DVD look like crapola!!!!

[im4umia]

I have a 3 GHz processor, 3 GB RAM, and 85 GB available on my hard drive.

I am using a DVDXpressDX2 to capture VHS content.

Editing/burning using Ulead Video Studio 9 SE DVD onto Memorex DVD+R discs via Philips DVD+-RW DVD 8801 burner.

The resulting DVD's look worse than the VHS themselves. Especially when I transfer sports events or when there is motion and the action on screen is busy. Picture stutters and pixelates.

This is the Ulead setting I am using to burn the discs:

MPEG files
24 Bits, 720 x 480, 29.97 fps
Frame-based
(DVD-NTSC), 4:3
Video data rate: Variable (Max. 8000 kbps)
Audio data rate: 224 kbps
MPEG audio layer 2, 48 KHz, Stereo

I want the best quality possible. If someone could please tell me what I am doing wrong or what equiptment to buy to accomplish this I woiuld be most grateful.

I am very disappointed and surprised with the poor quality of my discs.

Thank you!

[thecoalman]

What software are you using to capture and what settings?

Whatever the case you should be using whatever Adstech provided with the device. First go to their website and download the newest software avaialable if there is a new er version, check to see if newer drivers for the device are available.

Make sure your using the highest capture settings avaialble.

You have to match the capture settings in Ulead, look up smartrender under the help files.

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Conversion to DVD isn't going to make it look better, you can expect to look reasonably close to the original VHS.

[lordsmurf]

Your device is part of the problem, as well as your choice in software. It's cheap stuff.

Capture AVI, encode interlaced MPEG-2 with good bitrate. That would help.

[thecoalman]

Your device is part of the problem, as well as your choice in software. It's cheap stuff.

Don't know anything about the device itself but being that i use the same softwware for encoding, at least I'm assumin they are both the same because mines a different Ulead product. I'd have to disagree with the comment about the software, it produces very good results if used properly. In fact since it will only reencode MPEG where needed it's a very good choice for this particualr device.

Capture AVI, encode interlaced MPEG-2 with good bitrate. That would help.

The device is a MPEG hardware encoder, that won't help. Just roll out of bed LS? :P

[im4umia]

What software are you using to capture and what settings?

ADS Tech CapWiz. Capture settings are:

in DVD Format MPEG-2 (which I have been using) w/Video Resolution setting: 720x480 (DVD)

Other choices:

in SVCD format MPEG-2
in CD format MPEG-1
in DIVX format MPEG-4
in iPOD format MPEG-4
in Sony PSP video format MPEG-4





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Conversion to DVD isn't going to make it look better, you can expect to look reasonably close to the original VHS.

Thanks, but I do realize that.

My DVD's look worse. Not horrible but definitely a grade or two below the sourced VHS..

[lordsmurf]

Coalman, no, I'm just not researching his equipment. That doesn't change anything, however. He needs to work more on the capture end and encode settings.

Going MPEG to MPEG means the first MPEG needs a very high bitrate, possibly even some GOP tweaking (I-frame only, for instance). DO NOT DE-INTERLACE!

You can easily make DVDs that look better than the VHS tape; I do it almost daily. Equipment and knowledge are the key factors to achieving that goal.

[thecoalman]

in DVD Format MPEG-2 (which I have been using) w/Video Resolution setting: 720x480 (DVD)

Well that's what you want to use but that's not the whole settings, the entire settings would be similar to what you posted from the Ulead. See if there is setting for bitrate. Set it at 8000kbps if you can.

When you import it into VS you have to match the settings so it doesn't reencode the video, this basically preserves the video file as it was encoded from the device you have. You can right click a clip in VS and select properties to get better information on the clips properties. If your results are still bad it's the results of your device not the software. One of the benefits of having a MPEG hardware encoder such as the one you have is speed, not reencodeing the video preserves the quality and speeds the DVD creation up tremendously but there are trade-offs.

As I suggested above look in the help file for smartrender. I don't have VS so I can't give you specific directions, I do have a few Ulead products and the basic features for encoding are pretty much the same. Cut out a short clip of about 10 minutes preferably with a lot of motion, get your=self a RW disc for testing.

You can easily make DVDs that look better than the VHS tape; I do it almost daily. Equipment and knowledge are the key factors to achieving that goal.

Yes I know you can make it better but I pretty much have consigned myself from even attempting to do it with MPEG let alone trying to explain it to someone else.

[im4umia]

[quote="thecoalman"]See if there is setting for bitrate. Set it at 8000kbps if you can.
There is not a bitrate setting option to capture the video. There is for burning w/Ulead and it is set @ 8000kbps. I have been using DL discs for football games with commercials edited out which allows them to be burned at the highest resolution. But they look cheap. Again, the tapes look better. Keep in mind some of these tapes were recorded at the LP setting and they absolutely look better than my finished DVD product. I also burn single layer discs with the same crummy results.

Also, I see the picture clipping or stuttering or dropping frames .... not sure what you call it but I see super quick jumps in the video when its being captured. Faster than a blink. When football players are jumping in a group to celebrate a score for instance, the picture has a lot of noise in it. Quite noticable. All of this is what's transferring to the discs.

I'm happy to scrap my setup and purchase the proper programs and hardware. I'm looking for recommendations.

I really appreciate the feedback. I'm quite frustrated as I've already transferred and thrown out over 35 tapes. Family stuff mostly. The discs are viewable so it's not like everythings lost but the quality is poor.

thanks again.

[HolyGeez]

why not just buy a dvd recorder ? ? ? ?

[im4umia]

why not just buy a dvd recorder ? ? ? ?

I have a DVD recorder, VHS combo. Impossible to edit.

[thecoalman]

There is not a bitrate setting option to capture the video. There is for burning w/Ulead and it is set @ 8000kbps. I.

You have to match the settings in Ulead to the Video.... have you tried viewing the captured video? If the captured video exhibits thes jumps and quirks then you have a problem during capture.

I have a DVD recorder, VHS combo. Impossible to edit.

The video your DVD recorder makes is no different than the video your device is producing.

[nasdravi]

i used to do this for some time. Full dvd resolution is waste of space and bw, considering the source.
Set ulead to capture at 352 x 480 for NTSC or 352 x 576 for PAL. Bitrate at 3,5 to 4 k
Load the mpg to TMPEG dvd author to edit and burn
No conversion/transcoding needed

hope it helps

[tinker]

I think the part of your problem is a hardware DX2 box, Just read a review.
http://www.rossanthony.com/productreviews/dvdexpress.shtml
For fast movements (football game) it will have a pixelation and lots of drop frames.

[im4umia]

I think the part of your problem is a hardware DX2 box, Just read a review.
http://www.rossanthony.com/productreviews/dvdexpress.shtml
For fast movements (football game) it will have a pixelation and lots of drop frames.

Thanks Tinker ..... that is definitely part of the problem. Being new at this, after burning 30 odd discs I'm noticing little things and the DX2 capture phase does pixelate during heavy motion scenes.


Coleman: I will make sure the setting match. I did not know to do this.

ALL:

Can someone please suggest a good setup for all phases: capture, edit & burn? Just looking for good video to DVD results not top of the line, but solid quality.

[thecoalman]

Can someone please suggest a good setup for all phases: capture, edit & burn? Just looking for good video to DVD results not top of the line, but solid quality.

If your device is causing the problems obviously there is nothing you can do short of getting a different device. Here's the best you can expect, capture a file on the highest settings, import into Ulead, making sure the file is not renecoded create the disc. For all intents and purposes following those guidelines the softwre has nothing to do with the results because the file being burned to disc is the file created by your device.

The saying around here is "Garbage in, Garbage out" if your device is creating a mess chuck it in the trash and get something else. Before doing that though I would look on Adstech site, make sure you have all the latest updates including drivers, software and any firmware that may be available.

[Panash]

There are two aspects to this, firstly MPEG encoding exploits the similarity between successive fields/frames in the video stream, video noise causes the frames to be different so swallows up a lot of the available coding space immeadiately, taking the whole process close to the edge of collapse immeadiately. VHS has tons of noise there's nothing you can do about that.

Secondly, there's lots of movement in your sports videos, again making succesive frames different from each other. MPEG compensates for this by using a motion compensation system which searches for a moved macro block (like a sliding block puzzle) and then calculates frame differences from this.

The solution for (1) is as others have suggested, by increasing the bit rate as high as possible (circa 9Mb/s). The solution to improve (2) is to capture AVI and then MPEG encode using a decent encoder like Mainconcept.

Now here is the important bit; you have to find the search distance settings tab in the encoder and set this to be as high as possible. The time taken by the encoding process wil be increased by ten times or more but the process will then cope really well with fast moving soccer matches which will have large distance between the macroblocks.

The ability to do this makes software encoders streets ahead of DVD recorders for this type of application. DVD recorders will probably only manage to search within a few macro blocks because they have to do it real time, a half decent software encoder can take its time in searching for similar macroblocks. The ability to set the search distance seperates really good MPEG encoders from just adequate MPEG encoders.

All this is also true of home movies, with all the inherent 'shaky cam'

Burn to DVD using any recognised method, this is not critical.

PN

[im4umia]

There are two aspects to this, firstly MPEG encoding exploits the similarity between successive fields/frames in the video stream, video noise causes the frames to be different so swallows up a lot of the available coding space immeadiately, taking the whole process close to the edge of collapse immeadiately. VHS has tons of noise there's nothing you can do about that.

Secondly, there's lots of movement in your sports videos, again making succesive frames different from each other. MPEG compensates for this by using a motion compensation system which searches for a moved macro block (like a sliding block puzzle) and then calculates frame differences from this.

The solution for (1) is as others have suggested, by increasing the bit rate as high as possible (circa 9Mb/s). The solution to improve (2) is to capture AVI and then MPEG encode using a decent encoder like Mainconcept.

Now here is the important bit; you have to find the search distance settings tab in the encoder and set this to be as high as possible. The time taken by the encoding process wil be increased by ten times or more but the process will then cope really well with fast moving soccer matches which will have large distance between the macroblocks.

The ability to do this makes software encoders streets ahead of DVD recorders for this type of application. DVD recorders will probably only manage to search within a few macro blocks because they have to do it real time, a half decent software encoder can take its time in searching for similar macroblocks. The ability to set the search distance seperates really good MPEG encoders from just adequate MPEG encoders.

All this is also true of home movies, with all the inherent 'shaky cam'

Burn to DVD using any recognised method, this is not critical.

PN

Panash thank you but I do not understand most of this. The terms are all new to me. I will save this advice to better understand it at a later date when I have more experience.

To all: I also have Power Director Deluxe. I uninstalled Ulead and am currently capturing directly from my HDV cam using PDD. There are no options for capture settings, so I am unable to select the 'highest' setting. I see the video jumping forward in scenes taken from a moving bus. There is a 'dropped frame' monitor and it shows zero frames dropped.

[im4umia]

Some good news to report.....

The captured video does not jump like in the capture process. Runs very smoothly.

Now to edit and attempt to determine captured settings so I can match them for the burn.

I wll report back.

[Richard_G]

One point nobody else seems to have noticed, in Video Studio, you should not be using Frame based, but Field based. By using frame based you are deinterlacing and you shouldn't be. That will cause jerky motion. If you change your Project settings to Field based, you will get a choice of upper or lower field first. One will be correct, the other will make it worse. If you look at the properties of the mpeg file in VS, it should show you which it has been encoded in, make the project settings the same and make sure you turn on Smartrender.

[saggitarius]

I have had some luck recently by going the Av/DV way. I have a CanonZR700 miniDV camcorder that has Analog to Digital passthrough. This basically works like a TBC to correct timing flaws that are common with older and well used VHS tapes. I used to try to capture my VHS tapes with my AIW 9800 pro through the VCR, but some tapes (and especially the commercial ones) would play fine on the TV but I would get the flagging issue on my capture and also the pinking/greening issue as well where some areas of the picture flash and change colour during playback.

Now, I just hook everything thru my Canon first and capture to AVI using WinDV, do some filtering with VirtualDub (when neccesary) and then encode to DVD specs with TMPGEnc.

[im4umia]

Right clicking on the file, here are the properties for a VHS piece captured thru DX2 video using CAPWIZ:

Type: VOB
Original duration: 00:04:54:03
Resolution: 720x480
Frame rate: 29.97 fps
Aspect Ratio: 4:3

Here are the properties of a HDV video captured from the camera IEEE connection using Power Director:

Type: MPEG-2
Original duration: 00:27:13:24
Bitrate: 23.64 MB/sec
Resolution: 1440x1080
Frame rate: 29.97 fps
Aspect Ratio: 16:9


Two very different scenarios to be sure, but what they have in common is neither platform (Ulead & Power Director) offers capture 'quality level' selections. Not that I can determine.

[pepegot1]

Capture with a good video recorder. I use a JVC. You will fine that the reverse is true: quality is improvd, not degenerated. Edit with VideoRedo. Great results.

[Richard_G]

The first file is a VOB so has been encoded to mpeg2 and then authored into a DVD, the second is straightforward mpeg2. However, right clicking and looking at the properties that way does not tell you what field order they have been encoded at. You need a video editor, like Ulead Video Studio, or Gspot to find that out.

[thecoalman]

but what they have in common is neither platform (Ulead & Power Director) offers capture 'quality level' selections. Not that I can determine.

Ulead offers any settings you want uless it's limitation of the SE edition you have, suggest you read the manual.

[im4umia]

but what they have in common is neither platform (Ulead & Power Director) offers capture 'quality level' selections. Not that I can determine.

Ulead offers any settings you want uless it's limitation of the SE edition you have, suggest you read the manual.

Actually I cannot capture with Ulead, I must use CapWiz with the DX2. When I attempt to capture with Ulead Video Studio it does not recognize the DX2 nor does it recognize my HD camcorder. The Power Director program recognizes both. Odd, because the Ulead came with the DX2!

I appreciate everyone hanging in here with me on all of this, as I am clearly learning as I go.

Thank you!!

[airwolfUK]

hi im4umia

I am at the same point you are. Recently acquired a DX2 and having blocky captures.

I can use UL VS9SE with the DX2 and do have some control over the bitrate. My last capture was set to 8000 and the quality is OK when played back on the PC.

However, when i run it through VS9SE or VS10+, the final DVD is not as good.

So much to learn...........

[friendlyzookeeper]

Remember to use a good tape player cleaner and good wires. Connectors are very important. Dropped frames are usually software settings and 8000 is devided by 16. Hope that your video card and sound card are independent from the motherboard.

Hope that CGMS/A is not the problem.