Has Anybody Perfected Capturing Laserdisc To DVD?

[monoxide77]

If anybody has perfected this (preferably using the Canopus ADVC-100), please share your methods! I'd love a complete step by step guide from capturing to authoring. if at all possible, i'd love to see a sample. i've taken everything i've learned from this site and put it all together but i'm not sure if i've got it all straight. there are so many methods but i need a method that is proven. thanks.

[The village idiot]

Well, it's not that difficult really. What problems are you having?

Here's my process using a Razzle Bridge (like the brooklyn bridge, but less reliable):

Boot computer, connect hard drive enclosure (no more room inside the 'puter), connect Razzle bridge. Connect laser player video/audio. Start DVio, and give it a file name and location. Play disc, hit capture button. Finish all captures, shut down computer (needed because I use the suck @$$ Bridge). Disconnect Razzle, and reboot. Open EditStudio, and make or open project. Drag segments into project, make in and out points. Convert to mpeg with mpegXS (add-on to editstudio). Open DVD Moviefactory, add chapter points and burn to DVD. The hardest part is finding the bit rate to fit the length of the movie. The Starwars movies are a little difficult because they are very long.

Now just substitute your ADVC-100 for the Razzle, and forget about the cursing (you won't have to). Drives should be formatted as NTFS!

[thxkid]

well using a Panasonic DMR-E20 I could fit any of my laser discs (125 of them) onto a single DVD-R perfect even star wars movies and the Indiana jones movies, built in TBC really helped picture quailty alot. Use the FR speed to get the bitrate to fit the DVD-R perfect, no matter if it was 80 minutes or 150 minutes.

[The village idiot]

Yes an E20 or E30 or HS2 would be easy.

[monoxide77]

Well, it's not that difficult really. What problems are you having?

Here's my process using a Razzle Bridge (like the brooklyn bridge, but less reliable):

Boot computer, connect hard drive enclosure (no more room inside the 'puter), connect Razzle bridge. Connect laser player video/audio. Start DVio, and give it a file name and location. Play disc, hit capture button. Finish all captures, shut down computer (needed because I use the suck @$$ Bridge). Disconnect Razzle, and reboot. Open EditStudio, and make or open project. Drag segments into project, make in and out points. Convert to mpeg with mpegXS (add-on to editstudio). Open DVD Moviefactory, add chapter points and burn to DVD. The hardest part is finding the bit rate to fit the length of the movie. The Starwars movies are a little difficult because they are very long.

Now just substitute your ADVC-100 for the Razzle, and forget about the cursing (you won't have to). Drives should be formatted as NTFS!

does this program automatically convert the audio to ac3?

[mpb]

If anybody has perfected this (preferably using the Canopus ADVC-100), please share your methods! I'd love a complete step by step guide from capturing to authoring. if at all possible, i'd love to see a sample. i've taken everything i've learned from this site and put it all together but i'm not sure if i've got it all straight. there are so many methods but i need a method that is proven. thanks.

I have it pretty well down pat, but I'm not using the materials you are, so this info may only partially apply to you. I'm capturing using an ATI All In Wonder via normal composites. (DV just recently became an option for me. Naturally if you can capture through a DV-cam's passthru then just do it that way). I have a good ol' Pionner CLD-503.

1. I have not yet run caps from a *progressive* LD player - not sure what will be involved with that - except that captures will not have to be deinterlaced and should have doubled horizontal resolution in effect. My capture card doesn't have Y-Pb-Pr connects anyway so it's probably a moot point. So, I capture 720x480 in Virtualdub, AVI uncompressed. It's a big file but not really a problem.

2. I then leave the file interlaced and convert with TMPGenc, using as high a bitrate as I can without making it too large for a single DVD. 2-pass VBR is good for this because you get good quality in the motion scenes without sacrificing file space. There's a very visible difference between this and capturing with hardware MPEG1/2 - I would never do hardware compression after what I've seen in practice.

3. AC3 control from LDs is encoded on the right analog channel but we have no good way to read or interpret that. So I capture the PCM sound in straight PCM, losing nothing, (other than that LD sound is 44.1 and the capture is at 48k so there's some wasted space). The pro-logic surround carries over nicely. It's the next best thing to having an actual DVD.

Good luck in your efforts!!

[monoxide77]

i appreciate all the great comments. one thing i'm kinda stumped on is applying filters through vdub without deinterlacing. since i never have luck deinterlacing, i'd rather leave it interlaced. when i do however, the filters (ie Temporal Smoother) turn out terrible.

[Green Lantern]

Here's what I've done to capture Star Wars Widescreen Laserdiscs.

In VirtualDub, I've captured using my ATI TV Wonder VE card (composite video input) at 720x480, 29.97 FPS and optical input into my Delta DIO 2496 at 44.1 kHz. using HuffYUV compression. The audio is about 200 ms behind the video, but I can correct for that. I drop frames at the rate of about 1 in 10,000.

Because I have a widescreen TV and the movie is widescreen, but formatted for 4:3, I want to resize the movie so it looks normal on my TV. If you're going to view your video on a 4:3 television, then resizing is unnecessary. The first thing I do is run an inverse telecine filter, so that I can reconstruct the original progressive frames. This should eliminate problems with scan lines causing artifacts when I resize. Then, I chop 60 lines off the top and 60 off the bottom, leaving my resolution as 720x360. I then resize the video to 720x480 using a precise bicubic filter. The video now looks like right size.

A couple of issues I have: The video is occasionally jerky. At first I thought this was only during fast motion scenes, but this is not the case Some fast motion scenes are perfectly smooth while some slow video is jerky. My new theory is that the inverse telecine process is getting confused, possibly not detecting a telecine pattern shift and therefore reconstructing frames incorrectly. I'm trying TMPGEnc's inverse telecine filter to see if results are better than with VirtualDub's. Another problem is that my video is a bit noisy. I've attempted to reduce the noise using either VirtualDub or TMPGEnc, but so far I'm not 100% satistfied. Objects appear too soft; edges are blurred.

If anyone has a good combination of filters for cleaning up noise, please post.

[drewson99]

how did you make that emoticon?

ZZ

[Green Lantern]

When I post a reply, there are a group of emoticons presented to the left of this window. Under the options, I see that HTML is OFF, BCCode is ON and Smilies are ON.
8)

[Fred©]

how did you make that emoticon?

ZZ

All the emoticons are in left side of this forum... have you enabled them in your profile?

Fred©

[drewson99]

yes, I have the yellow ones, but not the one with the blurb and the fist...

how did you get it?

nevermind, I just viewed the sourcecode, it is his own homemade ani gif.

ZZ