VHS-DVD SUCCESS!! THANKS Overkill??

[Gritz]

Thanks to Cubanazo & others I finally created a nice DVD of "Always" (155 minutes) from an old VHS Tape. Initially I used MyDVD which came with my Pioneer A05, but the final result using "best" settings was very poor, looking like newspaper photos magnified greatly (large dots giving poor resolution). No help appears available at Sonic online as to why, so I capured with Virtualdub using Huffyuv codec at 720x480 (would SVCD have looked as good?) and I got a 65GB avi .... argggggg! Next I converted to MPEG-2 with TMPGEnc but did not separate the video and audio as suggested (as I wasn't sure how I'd get it back together later! ... so you can see I'm a greenhorn). Anyway .... after encoding I had both a wave file AND an avi file (surprise). At this point knowing nothing about authoring I dropped both the avi and wav onto MyDVD and tried a burn which ended in failure ... then I found out that the avi file still had audio buried within so I tried with the avi alone. SUCCESS! And it looks great and on one DVD! I am wondering though if 720x480 for VHS might be overkill and cost considerable more time? And would something else other than MyDVD be better for the last stage? Appreciate much guys .... without this site this would be a monumental task ... thanks. Any and all suggestions will be consumed with eagerness .........

Gritz

[CUBANAZO]

Great to hear that!...

Cubanazo

[likwid8]

Yes congratulations

[Jolard]

Almost anything would be better than myDVD for burning. The problem with myDVD is that it will automatically re-encode again whenever you add a file, even if it is already encodign to DVD specs using TMPGEnc. So even though it looks better than the myDVD capture (which isn't hard, I have experience as well) the TMPGEncoded file would have looked even better if it hadn't gone through myDVD again.

I would recommend using SpruceUp or DVDit. Neither will reencode your video. There are other tools that a lot of people use too, such as scenarist and Maestro, and Ulead Movie Factory etc, and I know most of those won't automatically reencode as well. MyDVD however is a bad choice.

[Gritz]

About Spruceup ...... I see just the demo available .... Is this one fully functional? I will give it a try. Thanks for the help.

Gritz