Want to put my OLD VHS tapes on DVD

[unclecc]

OK. I am sure this has been talked about alot...but I can't seem to get all of the answers, so here goes.

I have alot of VHS movies, specials, etc..that I would like to burn to DVD.
1 VHS Tape to 1 DVD+R.
Here is the equipment I have:
VHS player.
Digital Cam. (can be used in a PASS-THRU mode to capture)with firewire
and of course a computer. (p4 2.6 800FBS, 1 gig ram, plenty hard space, 128meg Video card)

What programs utilities etc do I need? (capture, convert, burn etc, or anything I may have missed. (shareware would be nice)

Should I burn all on DVD's or use both DVD and CD depending on size of VHS tape? (again, 1 DVD per VHS).

Thanks

[FulciLives]

Since you will be using your Digital Cam for pass thru you can use just about any program that works with your cam to do DV AVI captures.

One of the more popular that is freeware also is DVIO

You want to capture DV TYPE 2 instead of DV TYPE 1

You will want to use VirtualDub and there are many different versions or mods of VirtualDub with VirtualDubMod being the best. So I would use VirtualDubMod which again is freeware.

VirtualDubMod will allow you to import your DV AVI capture and edit it (we are talking simple cut editing like trimming the start and end points and removing TV commercials etc.)

You can also apply filters to help clean up the image. Look into the 411 filters which help to fix or "smooth out" the 4:1:1 color sampling of DV video which is really the only "bad" thing about DV video.

You then frameserve from VirtualDub to your MPEG encoder of choice. Most people use TMPGEnc PLUS or CINEMA CRAFT ENCODER aka CCE BASIC ... both are around $70 each

Then you will need a DVD authoring program. There are many choices here with TMPGEnc DVD Author and DVD-Lab being the two most popular. I prefer TMPGEnc DVD Author since it is simple and easy to use and in my opinion very stable and bug free ... DVD-Lab is nice and let's you be more creative with your menu designs etc. but the program has it's fair share of "bugs" and even though there are various work arounds for just about all the "bugs" it is not worth the hassle to me.

So really all you need to buy is your encoder and your DVD authoring program. So all in all you are looking at around $140 or more depending on your choices.

Please note that some poor quality VHS videos ... especially LP or SLP/EP speed recordings ... will benefit greatly from using a stand alone TBC device. Unfortunately the only "cheap" one that seems to work well is the DataVideo TBC-1000 and I say unfortunately because that beast is around $300 US Dollars. It does work wonders though on making your VHS videos more stable ... this results in a better image and less capturing problems such as dropped frames. Even SP speed factory recorded tapes will benefit from a TBC device.

As for DVD or CD I would go with DVD only. It is the most compatable format. Also you can use different resolutions on DVD ... for instance you can use Full D1 which is 720x480 or you can use Half D1 which is 352x480 and even the best quality VHS videos will look fine at half D1. VCD which uses the CD format has much too low of a resolution and bitrate to look good. SVCD has a good resolution but because of the CD format you can only go so "high" with the video bitrate and it really is not high enough to get a really good quality image. So DVD is the way to go if you want quality and thankfully compatablity.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman