Star Wars Conversions-Hit me with your best shot...

[dbaker6165]

rules were ment to be broken... haha... what type of response are you looking for?

[coyote]

If not broken......definately bent

[energy80s]

I believe in europe it violates fair use policies as well (I work in copyright by the way)

In Europe there's no such thing as "fair use" (although as you work in copyright, you'll already know this!) it is even illegal to copy a CD that you legally bought onto a cassette to listen to in the car. Record companies expect you to buy an extra cassette copy.

I'm not going to get into a piracy debate on these forums, but I know of no-one that doesn't break copyright laws at least once a day! Let your conscience be your guide!!!

[Mythos2002]

Has anyone made any new advancements with their projects? I'm getting ready to start capturing again. What was the final recommended bitrate if you want to fit each film on one disc?

I'm still trying to figure out how to encode the sound separately. I used Lame, but the audio file didn't contain any sound.

Mythos

[Robster]

Myth, how are you dealing with the sound?

My audio comes in with the capture, so I use VirtualDub to pull it out into a WAV file. I then run that through BeSweet for AC-3 encoding.

Lame is for MP3 - is this what you're trying to achieve?

My bitrates for the three were:

Star Wars: 5000-9500
Empire: 4750-9500
Jedi: 4450-9000

The aim was to get them onto a single disc. Audio was AC-3 at 192kbps.

This left just enough room for my own menus and scene selection screens. If I had dropped those, I could have had slightly (very slightly) higher rates.

However I will also do 2-disc versions using higher rates and uncompressed PCM audio.

[flaninacupboard]

just curious, i know some of you are having a lot of trouble with these, would anyone be interested in/is able to host some files to help out those struggling with the project? i thnk 6gb Xvid files would probably do the trick.

[Mythos2002]

Myth, how are you dealing with the sound?

My audio comes in with the capture, so I use VirtualDub to pull it out into a WAV file. I then run that through BeSweet for AC-3 encoding.

Lame is for MP3 - is this what you're trying to achieve?

I couldn't get BeSweet to work. My goal is pretty much PCM at 192 or 224. My LD's don't have AC-3, so I don't need that.

My bitrates for the three were:

Star Wars: 5000-9500
Empire: 4750-9500
Jedi: 4450-9000

I take it those were your Average and Maximum rates. What did you do for minumum rates.

The aim was to get them onto a single disc. Audio was AC-3 at 192kbps.

This left just enough room for my own menus and scene selection screens. If I had dropped those, I could have had slightly (very slightly) higher rates.

However I will also do 2-disc versions using higher rates and uncompressed PCM audio.

Thanks Robster

I'm capturing the audio at 44100 16bit Stereo along with the video in Virtual Dub. I don't capture at 48000 because it gets out of sync. I convert it to 48000 later in Virtual Dub. Can I capture the the audio and video like this and then separate the Wav file like you did later?

I also have a question about dropped frames. When I captured side 1 of disc 1 of Empire, 1 dropped 2 frames. I dropped 4 frames on side 2. Is this really bad? I know dropped frames aren't good, but will that small amount hurt that much? Thanks.

That's awesome that you have finished this project twice. I'm only at the beginning.
Mythos

[Robster]

Can I capture the the audio and video like this and then separate the Wav file like you did later?

I don't see why not, but I'd rip the audio out before doing anything with it. In VirtualDub, just open your .avi file and from the File menu choose 'Save WAV' and voila! You've just pulled the audio out to a separate file. As long as you don't start editing them independently your sync will stay true.

This is the workflow for my conversions:

1. Capture.
2. Use VirtualDub to join the separate .avi captures together.
3. VirtualDub to remove the excess - the bits at the start, end and inbetwen LD sides and save this to a new .avi - this is my 'archive' from which all further work is done.
4. Extract audio to WAV using VirtualDub.
5. Process video using TMPGenc
6. Process WAV into AC-3 using BeSweet.
7. Author DVD using DVDLab.

As for your dropped frames, I'm not sure. I use a Canopus card so I don't get dropped frames. I imagine a one or two frame drop isn't going to cause much in the way of problems but the others guys will be able to give you a better answer.

That's awesome that you have finished this project twice. I'm only at the beginning.

I have the single-disc versions of SW completed and I['m pretty happy with them. The 2-disc versions will look and probably sound better but they can wait a while.

I also have my conversion of Pink Floyd's Pulse concert encoding at the moment. This is a 2hr 25min show, so I'm going for 2-discs with uncompressed PCM audio. The quality of a test I did was exellent - especially the sound.

You have to remember though Myth that I've invested a fair amount of money in the equipment to do this work. There's the card, two new processors and motherboards (Asus A7N8X and Athlon XP 2500+) - plus additional hard drive (machine #1 now has 2 x 120gb and machine #2 2 x 180gb plus additional drives in external bays and in a third PC). I didn't want to have to rely on a single PC to do all this work, there's just too much processing and storage involved. It's also taken several encoding attempts to get the right file sizes.

[Mythos2002]

Thanks for the information again.

I'd rip the audio out before doing anything with it. In VirtualDub, just open your .avi file and from the File menu choose 'Save WAV' and voila! You've just pulled the audio out to a separate file. As long as you don't start editing them independently your sync will stay true.

I have five AVI files for Empire. Do I join the AVI files together and trim out the unnecessary frames first or do I open each AVI and sav the WAV file first?

I ended up with 17 dropped frames total.
2 for Side 1
4 for Side 2
4 for Side 3
4 for Side 4
3 for Side 5

Hopefully, that's not going to mess me up too much. Also, I don't notice the Analog noise so much in the video. I guess I either got used to it or fixed something when I reformatted and reinstalled. I also upgraded to DirectX9.0a, but I did create a System Restore point before installing it.

Flaninacupboard: I like your idea. I would love to see the progress others are making, so I can mirror it as close as possible with the exception of limitations in my equipment.

Mythos

P.S. I haven't been receiving e-mail about this post. I'm subribed to it, but nothing ever comes in. I always make sure not to click on the unwatch link.

[indolikaa]

Wait a minute!!!

Didn't the Betamax lawsuit in the early 80's establish consumers' rights to record material for their own private use?!

It was my understanding that we consumers (defined by the MPAA as 'devious bastards, in general') have the right to backup our material, seeing that the studios love to put things into 'moratorium' (see Disney) so when our copy fails, we get screwed.

I asked around, and a comrade of mine here in AZ says that you CAN backup your material for private use, but the instant that you ALTER the material, you are in violation of copyright law. So, does using TMPEG to 'enhance' material constitute alteration?

Sorry so late in the thread. We've had some fire issues in AZ these last few days...

[Robster]

Myth, do all the joining and trimming first. That way you end up with your final .avi ready for encoding and a WAV file to match. If you pull the WAVs out first you'll have to edit those too, resulting in more work and probable loss of sync.

[Robster]

So, does using TMPEG to 'enhance' material constitute alteration?

No more than recording the VHS or whatever else.

Anyway, that's another thread.

[Mythos2002]

Robster,

I hope I didn't make a mistake. Last time, I captured side 1 of the film and about a minute of side 2 to use as test encodes. When I did those, I cropped the black bars off in Virtual Dub. However, this time I left them on. My file sizes are larger, but I figured I could crop the bars out with TMPENG after using Lanczos Resize in my AVISynth script.

I noticed you said to edit the AVI files together in Virtual Dub now. Is that better than using an AVISynth script? I edited two clips together in Virtual Dub and found it to be pretty easy.

I'll probably go with the two disc versions. Any recommendations on where to split the films (timewise) and what bitrates to use?

Would it be possible to take the two disc versions and reburn them to the hard drive and convert to single disc if they ever come out with a larger DVD-R? I know this isn't likely, but I was curious. I guess DVDtoAVI could do some of it.

Thanks.
Mythos

[Robster]

Myth,
I've never used AviSynth so I can't comment on that. Editing is incredibly easy in VirtualDub which is why I use it. It's ideal for joining multiple captures together and removing the unnecessary parts. Obviously the edits are applied to the audio stream too, which makes life much easier.

You can indeed make a two-disc DVD into a single-disc. There's several how-tos here on the site somewhere.

Thing is, do try and do a single disc version. I think you'll be surprised at how well they can come out. I've just finished a test of Pink Floyd's Pulse concert - this is a 2hr 24min show, full-frame with a stereo soundtrack. To get it onto a single disc I've had to use VBR of 4000 average and 8200 peak, but it looks GOOD. Very good in fact. My two-disc version looks a bit better and has uncompressed audio, but the single disc is still really impressive.

[Mythos2002]

Sorry Robster,

I guess it was borghe or one of the others I was thinking of when I mentioned AVISynth Scripts. I may either have to recapture or crop the black bars off in Virtual Dub. I don't have a lot of space left.

I'm trying to join two AVI files together which would total 20Gb, but Virtual Dub says they will equal 38Gb even when I select Huffyuv for compression.

Did you use Virtual Dub to crop the black bars during capture or when you joined your AVI files or did you use TMPENG or something else for getting rid of the bars?

Thanks.

Mythos

[Robster]

I used VirtualDub to join the three .avi files together and remove the excess. Make sure if you do so you enable the Direct Stream Copy in the Video menu, otherwise you'll be applying processing to the video stream which you don't want at this stage.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'remove' the black bars. I use the clip frame option in TMPGEnc to cover up the existing black letterboxing bars with pure black - this helps the MPEG2 encoding as less bits are required for those areas. But - those bars aren't 'removed', just 'covered up'. To actually remove the bars would mean you're cropping the active picture area and destroying the frame composition of the movie.

[Mythos2002]

Thanks for the information. I'm going to defragment my capture drive before I recapture. The report said it was 43% fragmented. I just hope it doesn't hurt the files it moves. I defragmented a different drive one time and it messed it up somehow.

Hopefully, I won't have any dropped frames after I defragment.

I have another question. Do you recommend changing the framerate to match audio duration? I capture at 29.97. When I look at the framerate tab where it says something about changing the framerate to match the audio duration, it says 29.967. I wonder if I should do that to each of the five AVI files, do that when I join them, or not do it at all.

Mythos

[txpharoah]

12 pages and counting.

Amazing.

I wonder if this is approaching the record of longest thread.

[Robster]

Myth, not sure about the rates. My own captures are at 29.97. The only frame rate alteration that I do is to perform IVTC when encoding in TMPGEnc. Again, the Canopus card takes care of audio so it's not something I've had to contend with.

[indolikaa]

43% ?! I didn't think Windows could run at anything over 10%!

OK. I finished Empire this weekend. I captured the video at 4500 at 720x480 and the audio at 320 @ 48000. The captured streams looked good, so I fed them to DVDit. Probably a mediocre program, but it was convenient.

The program took nearly 20 minutes to 'Transcode Audio' for DVD recording. Why would the audio need to be transcoded when it was recorded at DVD-legal sampling rates? This was your basic 'analog in' signal with no special processing...

[Robster]

Depends what format it's transcoding it to. If your captured audio is in WAV fomat then it'll be too big for a single-disc conversion.

[indolikaa]

That's the interesting thing. The Dazzle captures the audio and processes it into MPEG audio before it saves the stream to the hard drive. Never seen it need any additional processing with CVD or VCD. I figured, hey, I'll record at 48000 and avoid any additional post-capture processing. Guess I thought wrong.

[Mythos2002]

I have a question for those of you who are splitting each film over two discs. Where exactly did you split each film? Also. Did you make a message that would appear at the end of disc 1 that says something like, "Please Insert Disc 2."? I've tried searching the forum, but couldn't find anything about making messages like that. I guess that would be the authoring program.

Mythos

[flaninacupboard]

Well the discs i'm using are CLV so new hope and empire are just split at 1hr. haven't come to a conclusion on Jedit yet. As for "please change..." messages, no. -I- know there's another disc. anyone who opens the case will see two discs. anyone who has seen the film knows that that isn't the end. i hate "Program continues on Side B" messages, they just waste time! imagine how irritating it would be if you had a DVD multichanger and had to sit through 10 seconds of "Please insert disc 2".
Well, it would irritate me anyway

[indolikaa]

I think it's a good idea. I'm the type that wouldn't realize the disc has finished and think the DVD player broke.

If I remember right, you can. Can't you nest menus within playback sequences? I seem to remember that with DVDit! you could use submenus, and wouldn't a submenu page that said "Next Disc, Genius!" and then ended playback control work?

Let me see if I can find my manual, then maybe I can better describe what I'm thinking...

[borghe]

hey guys.. been away for awhile but have made some progress on my disc...

I did a rough encode at 4750Kbps.. I did the audio at AC3 2.0 192Kbps, and I included the commentary track at 64Kbps 1.0. I have menus created for a root menu and the scene selection menus for all 81 chapters from the laserdisc.. I am almost completely done with the movie. The only thing left is to figure out a way to make it seemless to access the commentary

here's the problem. Owners of the definitive collection know that it isn't a running commentary, it's scene specfic. So that means there are plenty of chapters on the DVD with no commentary. I was trying to figure out a way to do this.. The most obvious way would be to turn on a menu-like button during movie play back with a commentary switch/menu. Turning this on would cause a little menu button to appear at the bottom corner of the screen 5-10 seconds before the commentary begins and would allow the user to hit enter on their remote to then switch audio channels. In theory this should work, and has been used on titles like the matrix. The problem is that in scenarist everything works great up until I try to create the button. The problem is that it demands button subpictures to be flagged with forced start.. I don't want them to be flagged with forced start. I don't want them to play unless the user selects that option from the menu. Does anyone have any idea how to do this? If I flag forced start for the subpicture, it plays fine and everything works as described, but I need a way to turn off the subpicture for those who don't want the commentary option turned on.

besides that the disc is pretty much done. Once the final two menus (commentary and my personal credits) are done I will check to see how many megabytes are left on the disc and then reencode video one last time to squeak out every last byte of available space for compression.

[Mythos2002]

Borghe

That's awesome. It's too bad there isn't a way you could have a button flash on the player's display when the commentary starts. On mine, I have the onscreen displays for things like multiple angles turned off, but the angle button still flashes on the player itself. I know a commentary isn't an angle, but it would be nice to somehow tell the player to flash the angle button when the commentary starts. Or Put in some kind of menu option that lets you display the button on the TV screen if you want it or turn it off if you don't. That option sounds a lot more complicated though.
I hope you can get it worked out though.

I found an answer to one of my earlier questions the hard way. Don't use the framerate option "Change so video and audio durations match" until you have all of your AVI files together if you need to use that option. Those of you with better capture cards than I have (Canopus, DAC, etc.) shouldn't have to worry about that option. I may not need it either. I'm still testing it. If you don't have all of your segments joined, it will give you an error that the framerates are different. I was joining two segments together and deleting the original two after I verified the joined file was ok. When I joined them, I choose the above option. I did this to free up hard drive space. I repeated the process for sides 3 and 4. I received the error when I tried to join the file containing sides 1 and 2 to the file containing sides 3 and 4.

What I'm going to do now is not use that option and join the whole film together. If it looks out of sync, then I'll try that option.

I have another question. What would be the best way to make a two disc version? I figure I can always go back and make a one disc version from my two DVD-R's instead of getting involved with the LD Player and capturing all over again.

So, is it best to capture and join the entire movie and then split it in Virtual Dub or is it better to just join the segments that are going to make up each disc? Or. Is it better to join the entire film and split it within TMPEGEnc using the source range option? Thanks.

Mythos

Mythos

[Robster]

Myth, it's better to use VirtualDub to do the splits. This is how I did mine.

1. Capture.
2. Join caputre files together and remove excess (VirtualDub)
3. Extract WAV audio from new file.
4. Use VirtualDub again to split the new file into two at a convenient break-point.
5. Extract WAV audio from both new split files.

This way I have both a complete and split version of the film, but each has it's own corresponding audio track. If you split using TMPGEnc you're relying on it's audio processing which really isn't that good. Try and keep the audio separate to the video until you author the final DVD.

Basically, the point is not to re-capture anything. By a bigger hard drive if need be.

[Robster]

I thought I'd post some results of my Pink Floyd 'Pulse' LD to DVD conversion.

I've found this project to yield better results than my Star Wars discs, mainly because the video signal is so much cleaner. Also, as the source material wasn't telecined, I didn't have IVTC during processing.

This is 2hr 25min concert, so the bitrate for the single-disc version had to be kept low. I managed to to do it at 100-3950-8200kbps VBR. Audio is 256kbps AC-3. This also inclues a single menu screen for track selection and the whole thing comes in at 4.36gb.

A two-disc version, which I'm still working on, uses a video rate of 100-6000-8200kbps VBR, but with uncompressed PCM audio. Although I'm very happy with how the single disc conversion has come out, the two-discer does exhibit greater video quality (basically no visible pixelation that I can see) and the audio seems a little nicer too. I'm also doing slightly more elaborate menus.

Here's a collection of screen shots. These are direct captures from PowerDVD with no processing or alterations:

http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf01.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf02.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf03.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf04.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf05.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf06.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf07.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf08.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf09.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf10.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf11.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf12.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf13.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf14.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf15.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf16.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf17.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf18.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pf19.jpg
http://www.robgillespie.dsl.pipex.com/images/pfmenu.jpg

The last one is a grab from the track selection menu screen I created in DVDLab. The background image is a manipulated scan of the original Pulse CD cover (DVDLab has tons of effects you can apply to images). The font is Alberus Medium, the same used all over the Pulse CD and LD covers. When you navigate through the selection, the underline appears beneath each track title. It took a while to get the positioning and underlining sorted out (and of course the links and navigation), but I'm please with the results.

[louthewiz]

Hello guys im a newbie at dvd backing up but I was able to get my hands on the second release THX widescreen LD editions and I would like to burn them to dvd. Now I also just purchased a DMR-E20 at a very good price ($204.00) and I want to know is it possible to do this with my new dvd recorder and my panasonic LD player? Because I am also a big star wars fan and I just get tired of getting up to swap discs instead I want to just have them on dvd and use my dvd changer and watch all 3 in 1 shot!!!! So any suggestions will be welcome and thanks in advance..