I've Captured My VHS... Now Are These Steps Right?

[EViS]

I've captured my VHS videos in .mpg PAL DVD resolution (720x576) at a 15,000 bitrate. Don't want to sound ridiculous or anything, however now what do I do prior to Authoring the DVD with Menu's & Titles inbetween clips using Photoshop, After Effects, and Encore?

I need to remove the VHS hiss using Audition so I extract the audio file from the .mpg in Audition, correct?
Then I convert to DD2.0 in Audition and re-mux the new audio file and high bitrate video file, correct?
Then do I start authoring in Encore and once all Menu's, etc are in place do I re-encode the .mpg to a lower DVD-compliant bitrate and burn to DVDR using say ImgBurn?

OR Am I doing something in the wrong order here and should be using TMPGENC Plus for something?

Also what aspect ratio should I be re-encoding in?

Many thanks in advance to this final step in what has been a very steep but enjoyable learning curve over the past few weeks .

[BobK]

I've captured my VHS videos in .mpg PAL DVD resolution (720x576) at a 15,000 bitrate.

Then do I start authoring in Encore and once all Menu's, etc are in place do I re-encode the .mpg to a lower DVD-compliant bitrate

Why not capture to the lower DVD-compliant bitrate to start with? Aside from the time you'd save by not re-encoding, you're probably not going to get a better picture by re-encoding than you would be capturing to the lower bitrate in the first place.

[EViS]

Ah this was all talked about in my previous threads, simple reason was because I couldn't afford to purchase a DV-AVI capturing device and wish to keep these mpg's as backup for the future... thus a higher bitrate will give me more lee-way in the future to convert to other video standards if need be.

[redwudz]

You would have to re-encode that video down to work with a DVD for a standalone player. This from our DVD specification page:

Total bitrate including video, audio and subs can be max 10.08 Mbps (10080 kbps)

Of course, starting with 15,000kbps should allow you to do that with little or no reduction from the original VHS quality.

And I should mention VHS quality is just a little higher than VCD quality. 1/2 D1 DVD format would probably serve you just as well.

I would re-encode before you create your menus. I'm not sure of your audio format, but AC3, or for PAL, MP2 would be good choices. Depending on your VHS quality, the captured video might benefit from some light video filtering. You can usually add that during the encoding. Filtering does add time to an encode, sometimes a lot, depending on the filtering. Do some tests and see if it helps or is a waste of time.

For encoding, I would try your 15K video and make a short 10-15 minute representative clip and re-encode that with some different settings. Try 1/2 DI at about 3000kbps, and full DI at 8000kbps, and maybe 6000kbps. Also try a capture at a lower bitrate of ~6000 - 8000kbps. The main reason I would do this is to see what your hardware/software capabilities are. Once you have that sorted out, you should have a 'system' that will work best for you, your source data, your hardware and software and your final output to DVD.

[EViS]

Thanks v. much for that advice redwudz! Just to clear that up;

Before re-encoding the .mpg, should I extract the audio from the .mpg and filter the VHS hiss out in Adobe Audition?

What software should I then use to mux & re-encode the video/audio? TMPGENC Plus or Adobe Encore or 'other'? Bear in mind I would prefer the audio in AC3 (DD2.0) as I see no point keeping it as PCM (or would I hear a difference in PCM?).

As audio is on topic here, is it possible to create an AC3 2.1 audio track out of a stereo PCM file?

Finally, after re-encoding whilst authoring the DVD, will Encore convert the .mpg & menu's into vob's, etc? Will it definitely not re-encode (again) the .mpg video/audio whilst converting to DVD files as found in the VIDEO_TS folder?

[redwudz]

You need to think of the audio and video as two separate items, even though they are combined together (muxed) at times. You can filter the audio at any step in the procedure, as long as you don't change the length or a few other parameters. Filtering should not do that. But I would filter the audio early in the conversions. AC3 may not be easy to filter in that format. You may have to change it to a different format to filter.

If your audio is DVD compliant, then you don't need to change it. Re-encoding will reduce quality. On the other hand, if you have PCM audio, you would want to re-encode that to MP2 or AC3 as PCM takes a lot of space up on a DVD that would be better used for video bitrate.

You can encode PCM to AC3 several ways. One of the easier ways is to use ffmpeggui and it will convert to stereo AC3. Aften will also do this a little faster and possibly better.

If you need to re-encode the video, it depends on what you have available. I prefer TMPGEnc Plus most of the time, as it's easy to use.

For demuxing/muxing, since you have TMPGEnc Plus, it can do that in 'File>MPEG Tools'. I'm not sure how many audio formats it accepts, but definitely it should accept PCM.

TMPGEnc DVD Author accepts separate audio/video streams. Not all authoring programs do. Some may require the audio to be muxed with the video.

I hope that's all not too confusing. Most of it's just something you learn with time and experience.

The main thing is to develop a 'system', then it all becomes simple once you have it figured out. You should be able to use the same process each time, maybe modifying somewhat for different source file types. Trying it all with short clips will speed up the fine tuning.