Do I have this right?

[macmac15]

I'm new to this all but I think that I have the jist of it, and I just want to make sure.


First what I have, I have a bunch of VCR tapes at home, that I want to move off on to DVD's. I have a Canopus ADVC-100 to capture from the VCR to my computer. Although it seems that VirtualDUD is the App that is used the most to facilitate this, because of my setup it would apear that my Canopus ADVC-100 is not usable with this app. I have decided to go with Scenanalyzer. I have not decided on what CODEC to use as of yet, so any recomendations with this setup would be great.

I will be using me DELL Inspiron 8500 2gig P4 512mem, and 60gig hard drive with a 64meg geforce4 TI 4200 card, but I don't think that the Video card has anything to do with the capture right?

So my understanding is that all I have to do is capture the video using what ever resolution that I find works best, (sounds like 352x240 will be just fine over 720x480 I belive since I'm in the US these would be the settings for NTSC) on to my computer into an avi file from the VHS tapes, from there I can use the tools inside of scenalyzer to edit out the commercials, and run some filters to clean up the data. Then convert to mpeg2 because this is what is needed for DVD's, not sure if scenalyzer can do this or if I need another product.

From there just follow the guides here to create a menu for the DVD and then burn it.

Is there a way to test the data that you are going to burn to a dvd before you burn it, like from the menu that you have created?

[macmac15]

I had a follow up to my original post, I was just doing some more searching and I took a look at Nero's web site. It seems to me with thier, NeroVision Express that this product would be able to do all of the capturing, Filtering, converting, menus and burning.

Any one else using this or could recomend a better product, the price is not a concern, at least not to much of one.

[Gazorgan]

I would try capturing with IUVCR (free 30 day trial). WDM driver used: ie new stuff. You can capture in MJPEG or HUFFYUV. You can filter (clean up noise, resize, crop, letterbox, watermark, edit out crapola, etc) with AVISynth or VDUB, then encode to MPEG2 with CCE or TMPG.

VDUB capturing is a coin toss (VFW drivers required: ie old stuff).

As to resolution, that depends on the quality of the tapes. VCD resolution is allowed, and at higher bitrates it looks pretty much like a VHS tape. You could probably get close to 5 hours/disk?

[housepig]

I have not used Nero Vision Express, but I have seen posts that the capture part of the application is very limited, and doesn't give you any customization options about capture resolution, codec, etc.

I have also heard the same about the conversion & encoding aspects of that program - you basically get a button that says "convert" - no control over how it's done.

The way I do VHS captures, with great success, is capture with iuVCR as a 720x480 avi, Huffyuv codec. I cut anything that needs to be cut with Virtualdub. (approx. 26Gb per hour)

I encode the avi with TMPGenc to a dvd-compliant mpeg2 file.

I import the encoded mpeg file into DVD Lab and author the dvd.

Cost - $50 (TMPGenc) + $80 (DVD Lab) = $130. (Virtualdub is free).

great quality, and total control over the output.