My capturing horror story, VHS > DV w/scenalyzer&Virt

[trojanrabbit]

I just wanted to relate my experiences as a newbie for trying to create my second VHS>DVD conversion because I'm still mucho confused but I think I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

My setup is a VHS deck connected to a Sony GV-D200 Digital8 deck which connects to my PC via Firewire. I've been using Scenalyzer for capture since it appears to be the only way I can keep A/V sync.

I captured about 3 1/2 hours of video broken into many files at each commerical break. I used Movie Maker to edit the AVI files then encoded with TMPGEnc. The resulting DVD looked like crap, on screen text was unreadable with lots of blockiness. Even making a test DVD with the bitrate maxed produced a crap picture.

Just for the heck of it, I tried another capture using the version of MyDVD that came with my Sony drive, it directly produces an MPEG file. Lo and behold, the picture was way better than any of my AVI files. But I wanted more control over my bitrate other than Good, Better, Best.

I did another capture with scenalyzer after double checking some settings on my Digital8 deck and played it with Media Player. Crap.

Just for chuckles, I downloaded the Panasonic DV codec and played the AVI I just captured through VirtualDub. It looked PERFECT. I then used VirtualDub to view the AVI files I previously captured that I edited with Movie Maker. Crap. So it looks like the Microsoft DV codec is what was messing up the AVI files.

As a final test, I took the last file I captured with scenalyzer which looked good on VirtualDub and encoded with TMPGEnc. It looks fine.

So it looks like if I want to do any editing, I can't use any program that will use the Microsoft DV codec to re-render. For now the only way I can view an AVI file to see if it really looks OK is to use VirtualDub, Media Player makes the AVI look like crap.

Oh boy, another 4 hours of capturing. Just thought I'd share my experience.

[redwudz]

I don't think the problem is the DV codec as much as it is Movie Maker. It's just a Microsoft toy. I use WINDV to transfer the DV to the harddrive because I don't really need to edit. Never had any sync problems, but I am using a ADVC-100. If Movie Maker is re-encoding your DV stream, then that is most likely the problem. Try another editor.

[trojanrabbit]

Whatever the cause of the degradation is, it is shared between WMM and WMP.

[yodel]

Whatever the cause of the degradation is, it is shared between WMM and WMP.

Just a remark, experienced the same, but when i encoded the DV-avi
that looked bad, encoded to Mpeg2 it looked good !
So i guess there's also an "issue" of the player not being able to decode/play the DV/avi (2) good on the screen.

[xiaNaix]

I think if you install the MainConcept DV codec it replaces the Microsoft one. That's a much better choice, anyway.

[wwaag]

trojanrabbit

Just my nickels worth.

Don't think you can judge much of anything by the way it looks on your PC with any of the media players. For the most part, they all look like c__p on my monitor, at least. The only way is to do a test encode, author it and write to your rewritable DVD, and then look at the result on your TV.

As an aside, I saw you have the GV-D200. I really like it but could not maintain A/V sync past 45 minutes or so using passthrough (also using Scenalyzer)--really bad!! Just curious as to problems, if any, with long captures.

wwaag

[trojanrabbit]

All I know is that once an AVI file was processed with WMM, any MPEG file produced with them also looked like garbage. Making a new AVI file from the original source gave me a good quality MPEG. I've made test DVDs with different bitrates and I could tell when I used the bad AVI file on both my TV and PC using PowerDVD. Since I finally found my original Studio 7 CD, I don't have to worry about editing any more.

I've had no problems at all with sync on the GV-D200 when using Scenalyzer up to 2 hours. As far as I could tell, it works identically to my Digital8 camcorder. The only other capturing apps I've tried is Studio 7 and VideoWave(3&4), and both give me the 1 second after 10 minutes sync problems. Since Scenalyzer works for me, I'm reluctant to try anything else.

[IJM]

Hi,

I found that the Mainconcept DV Codec tends to produce quite noisy output. I think it tries to do some sharpening. I got better results using the Canopus DV Codec ( v2.8 ).

I've captured a 1h33m live action movie from VHS via a Canopus ADVC-100 using Scenalyzer Live... five times.

I used AVISynth and Virtualdubmod to average all five captures together to reduce the noise. I then polished off the result with the Conv3D filter on very light settings. The resultant AVI was wonderfully noise free and highly detailed. It encoded beautifully in TMPGEnc for DVD.

It takes a lot of disk space, and some processing time, but if quality is your thing this is how I managed to get brilliant results. I can't take credit for the method though, I did this as a result of this thread I found on doom9.

Ian.