MPEG2's @ 18,000 Bitrate - Need To Chop & Shuffle. Where To Begin?

[EViS]

Just under two years ago I spent many months within the Restoration section of this forum. I captured all my family VHS's into 18,000 bitrate mpeg2 files. Fastforward two years and it's now about time I did something with all this film on my HDD.

I have 11 seperate .mpg files totalling approx. 150gb. Each file is a direct copy of an entire VHS tape and therefore there is no set order. Each VHS tape contained a variety of family events with no connection between them. I would like the final DVD's to have everything in order therefore there will need to be alot of cutting and moving parts of film from each .mpg around to form each DVD.

I own the entire Adobe CS3 Master Colletction and would therefore like to do as much as possible within it. However, if there is some better software out there, better suited for the job I don't mind purchasing it or borrowing a copy of a friend for a while.

The audio from each VHS capture is pretty bad with alot of hissing. However, I have found a fantastic video tutorial using Adobe Audition which seems to do amazing things to get rid of the hiss. I have yet to give this a go with my .mpg's.

So where do I start?

- Do I first need to seperate the audio from the video to edit the sound in Audition? If so, what formats & software?
- Do I leave the video in .mpg format for cutting & editing in Premiere? I will need to do alot of shuffling about between all the .mpg files, I am aware of MPEG2 limitations (hence the high bitrate). Is it best to firstly cut each large .mpg file into smaller (.mpg?) files, each one being a seperate family event. And then stitch these all together in the correct order for each DVD?

Any other advice is highly appreciated, including pointing me at a quality step-by-step tutorial for what I am wanting to achieve at this stage.

Many thanks in advance!

[thecoalman]

I'd suggest taking one file and apply everything you're going to do to it, audio editing, cutting, re-encoding to DVD compliant and authoring and get a final disc to test before doing it to all of them so you can insure the process worked. Make sure to mix the the order of the files up... The big thing you're going to want to look for is sound sync especially from the footage that appears near the end of the file.

Once you have a process that works and is tested I'd decide on how you want to categorize them first. Form there it really depends on the workflow in Premeire which I don't know so I'll leave it to someone else to describe.