Assorted Laserdisc Questions

[monoxide77]

1. Is there a definitive guide to converting laserdiscs to DVD?

2. My laserdisc captures have an unclear picture like VHS. Is this possibly the video cable I'm using (its actually a nice looking Monster A/V cable).

3. My laserdisc player is a Pioneer LD-V4400. Does anybody have any experience or suggestions with this model?

my reasons are because I have a very rare laserdisc that is not available on DVD and there are no plans to ever release this title on DVD. I want this to look as professional as possible. Thanks in advance!

[Tommyknocker]

Try using these settings in TMPGEnc after you have captured your LD to your computer.

[thxkid]

well I capture my laser Disc from a Pioneer LD990 into a happuage PVR encoder card using 480x480 MPEG2, then burn onto 2-3 CD-R's and they turn out great, I also use the S-video output on the Laser disc, when you capture what settings on the capture are you using, try to capture at least 480x480 AVI, huffy or 480x480 at 2000 bitrate MPEG2, if you are capturing in AVI make sure to setup TMPGE for SVCD at 480x480 at least 2000 bitrate, you should end up with 2-3 SVCD's discs to burn, you may have to cut your MPEG2 to allow only 796megs on each 80min. disc.
I would not suggest you drop below 2000 bitrate specially if you plan to play this back on anything larger than a 31in. TV.

[monoxide77]

is the s-video output a lot better than normal composite output? my laserdisc player doesn't have s-video out

[solarfox]

All else being equal, yes, S-video connection should give a better picture than composite, since your chrominance and luminance signals are kept separate from one end to the other rather than having to be mixed and split apart by filters.

However, I suspect your problem is not the composite video connection, nor the laserdisc player, so much as it is the capture card you're using. I'm sure some will disagree with me, but frankly, I've always found the capture quality of ATI boards to be mediocre at best -- I don't think they're really designed with high-quality video capture/editing work in mind.

The way I capture Laserdiscs (and VHS tapes, too) is to feed the output of the player straight into a hardware analog-to-DV converter and bring the video in as DV Type 1 via IEEE1394/Firewire link. (For "clean" sources like Laserdisc or original VHS, I go through a Dazzle DVbridge; for lower-quality sources, such as 6-hour SLP VHS recordings, I dub from VHS to my Digital-8 camcorder first, then capture DV from the camcorder. The camcorder seems to have an easier time handling "unclean" sync signals than the Dazzle.)

[monoxide77]

what analog to DV hardware do you recommend? and thanks for the insight btw

[solarfox]

Well, I can tell you what I use, anyway...

The system is an Athlon 1GHz with a 45Gb primary and 60Gb secondary hard drive. (The raw captures go to the 60Gb, since DV Type 1 consumes HD space at about 3.5Mb/sec; while the 45Gb drive is split into two partitions -- a 15Gb one for OS and applications, and the other 30Gb as a destination for the converted MPEG files. Not that you have to do it this way; I just prefer keeping everything in its own little compartment. ) It is equipped with a Western Digital IEEE1934 Firewire board, and the analog-to-DV converter I normally use is the Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge.

As to whether or not I recommend them, well... That's another matter. I'm not entirely thrilled with the Dazzle; it has an annoying habit of arbitrarily deciding that the incoming analog video is "copy-protected" if there's any sync instability, which makes capturing from VHS tapes (especially old ones, or recordings originally made in SLP mode) somewhat frustrating at times. It also seems to cause "Failed to build a preview graph" errors (whatever the hell that means) in ULead Media Studio Pro's "Video Capture" module about one out of four tries.

I'm considering ditching the Dazzle and buying one of the Canopus ADVC series, but I haven't finished doing my research on them yet.

[LanceSteel]

I'm considering ditching the Dazzle and buying one of the Canopus ADVC series, but I haven't finished doing my research on them yet.

I've never worked with the Dazzle capture devices but when I was doing my research on DV capture devices I read that the Dazzle products were crappy so I went with the Canopus ADVC-100. I would say that this is the best capture device that I've ever owned (and I've gone through 3 or so others.) The ADVC-100 can be a bit pricey (around $300) but it is well worth the money. I you don't believe me check out the user reviews under the 'Capture Cards' for the ADVC-100.

For monoxide77: I was trying to capture some old VHS tapes using a sub-par capture card and was getting horrible results but when I switched over to the ADVC-100 my caps looked just like they did on the tv (i.e. they looked good and were without any added noise.)

[monoxide77]

thanks for the great advice guys. i've been having not-so-great results using Vdub/Huffy/ATI TV Wonder VE. I seem to be getting signal noise or something (looks like you're watching the video from behind a mesh screen). I've also tried PowerVCR and the on-the-fly and the VCD profiles resulted in total garbage. i think i'm headed in the digital direction. this capture card stuff is for the birds. is there any guides or walk-throughs for using DV capture devices?

[The village idiot]

There is not much to DV capture/transfer. Resolution is 720x480 (NTSC) interlaced. Everything from that point on must be rendered. Before buying a canopus, you might want to look for the same type of device from http://www.datavideo-tek.com . They make some pretty good "stuff" too.

Here is one customer's review: http://www.datavideo-tek.com/content/product_info/dvformatconverters/dac100/Rusty_DAC_...Experience.htm

I think the DAC-100 may be my next analog to DV device, I'm using a Razzle DV bridge right now. It works, but not that great. If it is connected while the computer is booting (or before), the computer will hang and never boot. Other than that, I've had few problems with it.

[solarfox]

LanceSteel -- The Canopus ADVC100 is the one I was giving greatest consideration to, actually, so it's nice to have that confirmed.

monoxide77 -- DV capture is pretty straightforward, for the most part. The only part that gets tricky is that you consume hard drive space at the rate of 3.5Mb/sec while capturing, so unless you're running Windows 2000 and have your hard drives formatted as NTFS, or your capture software can do "seamless capture" where it automatically closes one file and opens a new one every time you get close to the 4Gb file-size limit of FAT32, you'll have to break up your captures into lengths of about 18 minutes or less and then stitch them together in your video-editing software. (Of course, if you're capturing and archiving TV shows, like I'm currently doing, this isn't really a major problem since commercial breaks usually come every 10-15 minutes anyway. )

However, since the DV captures are interlaced, you'll want to be sure to deinterlace them during the render-to-MPEG process, or you'll get a lot of very weird and annoying motion artifacts. (At least, that's been my experience when creating DVD's off of DV-type-1 captures using ULead Media Studio Pro's DVD-NTSC templates. If you're using other capture/encode software, then your mileage may vary, of course. )

[The village idiot]

solarfox:
Have you tried EditStudio from pure motion? I haven't done much with de-interlacing, but what I have done looks really good. Free trial for it and the mpegXS engine can be had at http://www.puremotion.com ,. I've been really pleased with it over all. The price isn't too steep either.

FYI. the mpegXS engine is based on the main concept engine, the de-interlace is from pure motion's programmers.

[grahammcdonald]

monoxide77, I have a laserdisc player with an s-vid out but there is NO picture dif at all! I read somewhere that all laserdiscs are produced in composite (composhite) video anyway
So my advice would be dont worry about it!

does beg the the question why you would want to encode from that source when dvd is avail - unless is something like back to the future which I think is the only reason for a LD player

[Tommyknocker]

Dear Grahammcdonald:
I beg to differ. As far as I know, movies like Star Wars: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, are not avilable on DVD at the time of this post. And if you were an avid LD collector, your collection was not complete unless you had these three classics on LDs. So I hope he is successful in his project. Some things just take time.

[monoxide77]

does beg the the question why you would want to encode from that source when dvd is avail - unless is something like back to the future which I think is the only reason for a LD player

DVD is my preferred format but i love my laserdiscs too. quite a few of them are not available on DVD and probably never will be. I own the back to the future trilogy but i am waiting till December for the the DVD. I have Scarface which is no longer available on DVD. The Star Wars flicks and the Indiana Jones flicks also are unavailable on DVD. But the LDs that i treasure the most are from the band The Cure. I have some really rare LDs and these will probably never be re-released on the DVD format. I'm really wanting professional results.

[imel6]

I'm in the middle of capturing a lot of laserdiscs and although the Canopus is quite good and highly recommeded I am getting better results using my old ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon. Ok, calm down people! The DV captures look pretty good but capturing via the ATI and using the Huffyuv codec looks better.
There are some tradefoffs though - the huffyuv (lossless compression) files are much larger than the DV counterparts.
If you need more info lmk.