Are my expectations too high?

[neworder71]

I just read a post from a guy who was disappointed with real VCD version of Star Wars SE he bought, about VHS quality. I was looking to transfer my laserdisc definitive collection version to SVCD (while spending less than $200). I would have just bought the VCD version, but I don't want the added scenes. I hadn't watched the laserdisc in a couple of years, but did last night since I was working on this project and I was stunned with the image quality. I've watching DVDs lately and forgot how good this "dead" technology looked w/o compression. Is this a pointless endeavor for me to try to approach LD quality?

[Mirror_Image]

You might know this already, but:

http://www.mindspring.com/~jzyber/prologue.htm

[thxkid]

Got you one better I have transfered some of my Laser Discs over to DVD using the Panasonic DMR E-20 Home Recorder and they look great, plus I can now take Star Wars and Song of The South that is only on Laser Disc over to friends house to watch now on their DVD Player. It helps to have avery good Laser Disc player to transfer I have the top of the line(at that time) from Pioneer LD979, with digital filters and side changing automatically.

[chas99]

When you said your friend bought a VCD. did he get a VCD or a SVCD version? A VCD is only 320x200 resolution - worse than VHS, but more convienent to trade. An SVCD can approach DVD quality but will not fit all on one CD. To get a whole movie on one CD you have to sacrifice quality. If you want to make SVCD's with good quality you will have to span disks. Where do you plan to play the SVCD's? Not all DVD players will work.

[mpb]

Laserdiscs can be capped and encoded and written to DVD... but to get good quality, the process is lengthy and careful.

I have yet to work on Star Wars. I'm saving that for when I get better at the process. I mean, I know I'm making compliant discs now, but that doesn't mean "perfect".

As I recall LD resolution is 512x384 or some such thing. So basically 640x480 would be enough to make a technically "full" grab of the frames, but that resolution doesn't really do anything for DVDs. Plus since this is an analog picture, capping at a higher resolution can only help sharpen and refine image details.

I did do a conversion of The Lion King from laser to DVD. As the film is less than 90 minutes long, I got to give it some nice high bits and still fit it onto a disc. I wish I had done it differently, though, because the LD had an AC3 track on it (as I recall... it was borrowed... I only owned the tape myself) and it would have been nice to find a way to capture that, compress that appropriately and include it. Though other than DVDit PE, no authoring software does well with AC3. And PE really BLOWS otherwise. The video quality I got was quite good.

I had to capture it very oddly in order to make it work... 720x540 as I recall, and re-encoding to 720x480 with "center, keep aspect ratio" (or possibly just "center") in tmpgenc. The resulting mpeg2 file was almost entirely image, barely any letterbox left, and since TLK was 1.85:1 this makes sense. Plus Virtualdub wasn't up to the task so I had to cap to AVI using Premiere or some other software. It was a while ago so I can't recall which. Probably Premiere. that's the limitation of VFW in WDM-land. at high rates and resolutions, you start pushing tolerances.

And before anyone asks, no, it's not up for trade or sale, ever. I don't screw around when it comes to Disney copyrights. Maybe another movie, another time. Good luck in your own conversion efforts.