Laserdisc Capturing Advice Needed Badly

[Mythos2002]

Hello,
I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice so that I can attain high quality captures from my laserdiscs to eventually burn on DVD.

First, here is my system.
AMD Athlon 1900 XP 1.6Ghz
Soyo Dragon Ultra KT333 with C-Media sound and SPDIF card
Gainward GeForce4 Ti4200 650 XP Golden Sample 128 DDR AGP4x with VIVO
512 Mhz of PC2700 DDR
20Gb and 80Gb Western Digital 7200 HD's
Win2k SP3
Pioneer CLD-D703 LD Player with S-Video and Composite video outputs and Digital Coax, Digital Optical, and Composite audio outputs

There is one bad thing, my hard drives are Fat32. Will that affect the quality or just make capturing and encoding slower?

One thing I would like to know right off. Am I going to be able to get good quality captures with my GeForce4 or am I going to have to buy a dedicated capture card.

Here is how I have it setup. I have the LD Player hooked to the GeForce card by S-Video by way of an S-Video cable and a special adapter cable that came with the card. I also have a digital coax audio cable going from the player to the SPDif input on the SPDif card.

I haven't had any trouble getting the capturing to work, it's just that I haven't been happy with the results. The LD's are 2.35:1 widescreen NTSC. So, do I capture at 740x480? I also don't know how to get the framerate correct. I know it's supposed to be 29.97. However if I capture at that rate, the audio is out of sync and is sped up faster than it should be. So far, the only way I have been able to capture and have the audio at the right speed and in sync is to capture at 30.30 fps. That doesn't seem correct.

Also, what filters should I use and what should their settings be? I have tried to follow guides, but they always show screens of options I don't have. I've tried Virtual Dub versions 11-13.

Should I leave it interlaced if the goal is to have the captures eventually turned to DVD's for viewing on TV or should I deinterlace them?

I'm also having a quality problem I don't know the term for. I did a small test capture of Star Wars. I noticed in some dark scenes that there was a lot of blocking or digital noise. An example would be Tarkin's brown uniform in one scene. Everything else looked fine, but his uniform had what I would call digital artifacts. They weren't interlace lines (as this was a capture I deinterlaced), but it looked like some sort of color problem or something. I hope someone will know what I am talking about and how to correct that.

Finally, are AVISynth scripts necessary? I've tried to follow the steps to create one, but VDub always says that it cannot open [name of captured file].avs.txt What am I doing wrong?

I would really appreciate some help with this, as this is something I have been wanting to do for some time and had to put a lot of money out to get the player and discs. Thanks.

Mythos

[Mythos2002]

Ok. I've been able to find some answers on Virtual Dub's Forum at http://virtualdub.everwicked.com/index.php?s=93c97d360f1ab4c2400a6a605b2c3eae

First off NTFS is better, but I'm fine with FAT32.

My videocard is fine for capturing. See more below.

The sped up and out of sync audio was corrected by capturing at 44100 instead of 48000 and then converting it to 48000 in Virtual Dub. By doing that, I can correctly capture at 29.97 fps with no frames dropped.

Still working on what filters to use.

Going to leave captures interlaced since I am going to DVD.

Strange quality problem was corrected when I enabled direct draw acceleration. Can't use Virtual Dub to capture in XP, but I can use it for everything else. I didn't notice the problem I described in my above post when previewing my captures on my XP partition.

Still working to figure out if I need to use any AVISynth scripts. I figured out what I was doing wrong and know how to get them to work though.

I am very happy so far and currently find no need to buy a dedicated capture card. The Ti4200 does just as well. You just have to have patience and tweak it until you find the results you want.

Mythos.

[flaninacupboard]

ah, so you did ask...
well, as for deinterlacing/IVTC yes you should. it means you encode 24 frames of similar information a second, rather than 29.97 frames of dissimilar information a second. this means 20% leass frames, so the bitrate is effectively 20% higher. this is good for films the length of starwars which are all over two hours. in any case your DVD player will transcode to 29.97 while playing back on an ordinary TV, or you get progressive images on a progressive scan TV. tasty!

[BJ_M]

removing telecine and de-interlacing on a laser disk can be tricky -- often not a standard telecine pattern was used and de-interlacing it can make it look jerky and such on a tv ..

best to experiment ..

[BJ_M]

you might want to read this thread also

http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=102812

[dphirschler]

Decomb will probably incerse telecine the "non-standard" laserdisc. It's an AVIsynth filter, so you will need to finally master it. But it's a sinch once you get it going.


Darryl

PS. Just what is a "sinch" anyway? Where did that phrase come from? Did I even spell it correctly?

[BJ_M]

cinch