Combining audio and video from 2 Mpeg's into a new Mpeg?

[MikeDS]

Hi everyone

I'm relatively new to video editing. In January, I bought myself a Leadtek Winfast 2000 XP capture card, and it has been great. Doing the job well and I've made a couple of great DVD compilations of some old VHS tapes (some containing material dating back to the 70s and early 80s!).

Anyway, I was wondering about something. I presently have 2 VCR's, one is a 10 year-old Mercury which gives excellent sound but a not-so-great picture (tracking problems, etc.), and the other is a relatively new (3 years or so) LG, which gives me a superb picture but for some reason my very old VHS tapes do not sound as good played through it. It's a Hi-Fi VCR (while the Mercury isn't) and I always seem to get terrible audio glitches. When I try to set it to play back in mono, it sounds muffled and nowhere near as good as through my old Mercury.

So I was wondering: Is there any way I can capture the same material twice (i.e. through both VCR's) and then combine the video from the MPEG captured using my LG with the audio from the MPEG captured using my Mercury? I'm currently using Ulead Video Studio 8, and I tried to combine 2 test MPEGs in this manner, ensuring that the starting frames were the same on both MPEGs, but I have found that VSP does not do a very accurate job in this regard, and I ended up with audio/video sync problems in the final MPEG even though when I previewed the clip in the program it seemed okay.

So my question is: Is there any program out there that can allow me to do what I'm trying to do? Is it even worth it? Has anyone here ever done what I'm trying to do? Should I just shelve both VCR's and buy a new one?

Sorry if I've rambled a bit too much, but I would really appreciate your assistance. I would hate to have to compromise either the picture or the sound when transferring my very old tapes to DVD, but the alternative is starting to seem like an impossible task...

Thanks!

Mike

[guns1inger]

It's not that difficult in theory. Here is how I would approach it.

1. Capture your video and audio from the LG. Don't worry about the audio quality, you wan't the best picture.

2. Capture just the audio from the Mercury. No need to waste space with extra video that you won't use.

3. Load up the video into my editor (Vegas 6, in my case)

4. Load the good audio track in along side.

5. Based on a combination visual cues from the movie, and also from the wave forms of the two audio tracks, I would line up the good audio to the video clip.

6. Once happy, I would mute the bad audio track, export the good audio track as AC3 2.0 (in this case), then frameserve the video to CCE for encoding. Finally author and watch.

The main difference in your case is VS8, and if it supports two audio tracks. If it does, use pretty much the same technique to line them up, kill the bad one, and render. There is no need to use two version of the video when it's only the audio you are after, unless it makes it easier for you to line everything up.

[MikeDS]

Thanks a million guns1inger!

I've never used Vegas 6 before. Is it any good? Is there anywhere I can download a trial version?

I'm using the SE version of VS8 and while it does support 2 audio tracks, it does not show the wave forms, which makes 100% accurate lining up of the audio to the video quite difficult. That's basically why I attempted to capture the video on both VCR's, so that I could line up the same starting frames, but as I said this caused problems because of some dropped frames (in different parts) on the 2 MPEG's. Anyway, I will look into another program for capturing/encoding, because as you said this probably isn't the most difficult thing to do with the right software.

Thanks again, I really appreciate it!

Mike