DVD Footage Restoration

[tecstar]

I have a DVD of some old 1937 film footage. It was obviously taken as a direct transfer from degraded film stock. I have loaded it into Videostudio from the DVD (which VS has loaded as .mpg files) I have applied some sharpening and visual filters and want to export the footage. Is it best to export to DV and then use that to remake a DVD or burn the DVD direct from VS? I am assuming that trying to reburn the DVD will involve some re-encoding anyway, so either way isn't going to make a difference other than having a DV file to archive.

Just wondered if anyone had any thoughts about what I am trying to do with reference to the file conversion aspect and minimising loss of quality.

[fvisagie]

I'm not familiar with Videostudio's capabilities, but here are some general principles and hopefully you can apply some of this to your Videostudio work.

Unless you have very good reason not to, it's always preferable to follow the shortest path from final render to final encode. That means no intermediate encoding before encoding for DVD - not even DV, which isn't completely lossless. In other words, ideally encode your final render directly to MPEG-2.

One case in which you may need to take a different approach is when your editing program cannot encode to MPEG-2, or does not do a good job. In that case, there are generally two preferred alternatives - either save to a lossless format like HuffYUV or Lagarith before encoding that to DVD with an external encoder, or try to frameserve from your editor to the external encoder. Few combinations of editor + encoder allow this, so you'd possibly have to use a losslessly encoded intermediate file in this scenario.

Cheers,
Francois