Finishing touches on Video Capture Process

[sabasigh]

Hello all. I've spent the last week reading VCDhelp.com and geocities.com/lukesvideo and think I've about got this video capture/VCD thing licked. I do need some help on the finishing touches so I don't go wasting the last few CD-R's that actually play on my Sony DVD player. Here's my setup:

Win2k machine, 512 Megs DDR ram, ATI Radeon 64 MB VIVO video card. I am capturing video from my TIVO unit.

I'm using Virtual Dub with the Huffyuv codec. I'm capturing at 720x480 at 29.97 fps. I'm only dropping 1 frame for every 10,000 frames captured.

I then encode the .avi file to a VCD file using a template in TMPEG encoder. The template I'm using is the VCD one set at 1246kbps bit rate. I set the motion quality at Very Slow and set the video source as Interlaced, Top Field first and source aspect 1:1 VGA and Full Screen.

Here's my result. Super sweet video quality for an hour's worth of video...however, the picture looks slightly squashed and letterboxed. There's a black bar across the screen both top & bottom with some flickering white line at the top. It's like this in the Preview mode in Virtual Dub. Also, the video itself looks kinda like slow motion, but the sound seems to synch just fine. Now the last VCD I produced, I actually picked the wrong VCD template and used the film template which is 23 fps which may explain the slow motion effect.

Here are my specific questions:

How do I get rid of the letterboxing, i.e. black bars in Virtual Dub?
In order to improve video quality, should I de-interlace the .avi in Virtual Dub and change the Video source properties in TMPEG?
If so, how do I de-interlace?

Any info is greatly appreciated because I've got about 2 dozen shows to get archived.

[x2pacalypsehalx]

use 1:1 as the aspect ratio and the source ar. Under advanced check off noise reduction and deinterlace..

[sabasigh]

I can do Noise Reduction & De-interlacing in TMPEG during the encoding process?

[x2pacalypsehalx]

yes