Best approach to edit and reburn a home dvd?

[cr8250]

Hi all, I have a set of videos on dvd that were recorded on a Samsung DVD-120maximum quality, from a digital broadcast. The video quality is quite good on the original. I would like to know which software I should use to remove the commercials,etc., and reburn possibly with menus, and not lose any/very little video qualtiy. I will be putting about 1 hour-10 minutes on each disc. Or should I use dual layer discs?

Here are the apps available to me right now:

Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 - I am new to this.
Adobe Encore DVD 1.5 - I am new to this.
ConvertX2DVD 3
VirtualDub Mod
DVD Shrink
DVD Decrypter


Quality is everything, so I am looking for suggestions.

This is what I have already tried:
Opened and resaved in Virtualdub Mod as uncompressed avi files (HUGE!)
Opened 2 avi files, totalling 70 minutes, in Premiere and tried reburning using "DV High Qualtiy 7mb VBR Surcode Dolby Digital AC-3" . Well, it looked terrible even on a standard tv. The video was grainy, bright/washed-out,etc.. Is this because I am technically reencoding an mpeg2 file. Keep in mind, each original video file was about 55 minutes each taken dwon to a total of 70 minutes. I need suggestions. Please help a newbie.

[redwudz]

You could extract out the MPEG file from the VOBs with VOB2MPG. This will give you a single MPEG file of the whole DVD with no quality loss. Then edit as desired. If you are just cutting, no need to re-encode. Author the results with your favorite authoring program or try GUI for dvdauthor. Burn with ImgBurn to a good quality DVD disc and you're done.

Lots of other ways. That's just my method.

And welcome to our forums.

[poisondeathray]

There is no "best" way, but I'll make a suggestion that will preserve the original quality.

Everything you've done so far will cause quality loss because of re-encoding. Even lagarith (although lossless), when you go to the stage of re-encoding lagarith=>MPEG2, there will be quality loss

To preserve original quality, you want an editor that doesn't re-encode. Videoredo is probably the best and will only re-encode the few frames around a cutsite if not on a keyframe. A free option is mpg2cut2, but it is not frame accurate.

Once you get your segments (e.g without commercials), import them into a dvd authoring tool. These do not re-encode, the just author the DVD structure. Most of them only take elementary streams (i.e. separate video & audio), so common demultiplexing tools would be dgindex, pgcdemux.

The most comprehensive (commonly used) authoring tool is dvd lab pro, but free options would be gui for dvd author, dvdauthorgui, dvd styler - they all have capability to do menus.

Good luck

[lordsmurf]

Extract MPEG+audio using this method
http://www.digitalfaq.com/dvdguides/edit/dvdrecorder/recorderedit.htm

Remove commercials with one of these methods:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/dvdguides/edit/editmpeg/removecommercials.htm

[cr8250]

Hi all, thanks for the welcome! It is great to find such a usefull site for this very topic.
Thanks very much for the suggestions. One final question.

Which encoder/settings would recommend? Would it be best to use VBR or CBR, for a video of this length? Or would I be better off burning two different versions and simply experimenting?
Thanks again.

[poisondeathray]

Which encoder/settings would recommend? Would it be best to use VBR or CBR, for a video of this length? Or would I be better off burning two different versions and simply experimenting?
Thanks again.

None.

Using an encoder setting or vbr/cbr would imply re-encoding which you don't want to do, unless you want worse quality

[cr8250]

Ok, will 70 minutes of video fit on one dvd without re-encoding? I am combining two videos from two discs.

[manono]

It depends on the bitrate of the sources. Their length doesn't really have much, if anything, to do with it. Why not just check the total size?