To frame serve or not?

[bolta]

Hey y'all . . .

This what I usually do when capturing VHS PAL tapes to PAL VCD

1) analog capture, using composite video out to a generic BT8x8 cap card

2) the capture to avi (352 x 288, MJPEG codec, qual=19) is done with Virtual VCR - typically capture 60mins of video at a time

3) using virtual dub to: rip audio to a PCM WAV file, re-encode video using vdub filters (usually use "smoother", setting 15, and others as required) to a new AVI file - typically 40 minutes

4) encode to a standard VCD using VCDEASY (cbr 1150, all stock settings) - typically 30 minutes

MY QUESTIONS FOR THE FORUM . . .

1) any speed advantage to frameserving from vdub to tmpgenc, over what I'm currently doing?

2) any quality advantages to capturing at 480x480, for example, as opposed to the standard vcd format of 352 x 288?

3) as far as analog captures are concerned, what have other people used to help clean the captured video up? (ie removed grainyness, "noise" etc)?

Thanks in advance,

B.

[RoopeT]

First of all, you shoul cap at least 352x576 to get both fields of your video.

Recompressing in Virtual Dub isn't a good idea either, as you lose quality every time you recompress (assuming you're not using a lossfree codec, such as huffuv).

Frameserving from Virtual Dub to TMPGEnc is an better option than recompressing the video first in VDUb, it also shouldn't take as much time. However, the best (and fastest) option here is to frameserve to TMPGEnc with Avisynth.