Question on first try transfering VHS to DVD

[Scuda]

Hi,
I'm about to embark upon my first attempt to convert my old VHS home movies into DVD's. I have been monitoring this site for several months trying to learn as much as I possibly can before made my first attempt. I based the design of my new computer on much of what I read here. This is my new setup:

2.8Ghz
60 Mb and 120 Mb HD
512 ram
Cendyne CDICD 00209
AIW 9700 Pro
XP home

Since I don't have a DV camcorder, I plan on capturing the video by hooking the VCR directly to the AIW. I would like to have the opportunity to edit the video if possible. My question is this; what steps do I have to follow in order to get the best results plus which software/settings should I use? With all of the "How to..." guides, I couldn't find one that answered this question directly; how to transfer VHS to DVD.

Thanks

[rplp4]

I USE Pinnacle Studio v7. Studio has good editing and can output to correct coding for dvd.

[Bob W]

I use this program which works very well and fast. It does it all capture,import,edit,author, and burn to DVD or VCD/SVCD to CDR.
http://www.mediostream.com/products/neodvdplus/index.html

[miamicanes]

Probably the least-intuitive and harshest lesson I've learned over the past month or so (since I bought my DVD+R/W drive) is that VHS itself is fairly low-res, but if you want your transfers to look at least as good as the original tape, you're going to do one of the following:

* encode to MPEG-2 with a high (3500-8000k) bitrate

* tie your computer up for outrageous amounts of time to clean up the captures so they'll compress well and look good at a low bitrate. How long is "long"? TMPGEnc took about 13 hours to render a 20 minute scene with noise-removal and 2-pass VBR on an Athlon 1800XP w/512 megs and a 15k Cheetah

* Spend $200-500 on a prosumer-grade SVHS VCR with internal timebase corrector, active tracking, and digital noise reduction (in effect, offloading the time-consuming task of noise reduction from your PC to a few specialized DSP chips in the VCR).

In theory, 2600kbit should be perfectly adequate to encode VHS, but captures from a normal consumer-grade VCR will leave/add lots of noise that will distract the MPEG-2 codec and soak up most of your bit budget (the codec can't tell the difference between a complicated, detailed scene and random noise). You can "lightly" filter it and probably get satisfactory (indistinguishable from the original VHS, free of obvious MPEG artifacts) results with 3500-4000kbit/sec and tolerable rendering times (say, overnight for 90 minutes of video), but if you really want to pack 3-4 hours onto a DVD and have it look at least as good as the original, it's going to take a LOT of work and patience.

There are two popular resolutions for VHS videocaptures: 352 x 480 (DV1) and 704/720 x 480 (DV2, aka "half DV1"). There's no clear consensus as to which res is "better", but remember... with clean low-noise captures, the amount of space required at either resolution is about the same. In other words, just because 352 is half of 704 does NOT mean you can use half the bitrate that's acceptable at 704/720 and get the same results. Due to the way MPEG works, it takes almost exactly the same amount of bits to encode two adjacent blurry pixels as it does to encode a single sharp one that occupies the same horizontal width.

Along similar lines, 480-line MPEG-2 captures from VHS will ALWAYS look better than 352 x 240 MPEG-1 captures from the same source. Why? VHS has poor horizontal luminance resolution, and even worse horizontal color resolution. However, its vertical resolution is relatively constant: 480. If you capture to 352 or 704 horizontal resolution and the real resolution of the tape is much lower, MPEG compression will reduce its size quite effectively. However, if you capture with a horizontal resolution of 240 instead of 480, you're effectively throwing away half of the data available to reconstruct the video. Even worse, you're throwing away half of your best data.

Whatever you do, don't deinterlace the capture unless it's from film to begin with. Normal interlaced NTSC has a framerate of 29.97 frames/second, but a temporal rate of 59.94 fields/second. In theory you could deinterlace to 59.94 frames/second and lose nothing besides time and storage space, but as far as I can tell, all the current popular tools (TMPGENC, VirtualDub, etc.) define "Deinterlace" as "deinterlace 29.97 frame/second 59.94 field/second interlaced video into 29.97 frame/second progressive" (which is what MPEG-1 uses). Deinterlacing to 29.97 frames/second (instead of a hypothetical 59.94, which as far as I can tell none of the apps can do) has the effect of throwing away and mangling half the temporal information conveyed by the video. The consequence is that when you author a video deinterlaced to 29.97 frames/second (vs 59.94 frames/second) back to DVD, it will probably exhibit noticeable judder and look kind of "unreal".

The moral of the story: throw away nothing -- horizontal resolution, vertical resolution, and temporal rate -- until you're absolutely, positively through using it and have rendered the final MPEG-2 video.

[Scuda]

Thank you everybody, especially miamicanes, that's exactly the kind of information I've been looking for. I'm trying to get off on the right foot. That's the beauty of a website like this one. People helping others. Convincing the wife that we needed a new computer to do this was very difficult, but once she sees her 17-year-old wedding video on DVD will go a long way to convince her it was a good idea. The sooner I start producing good results the better and the help of the people here has been invaluable. Thanks again everyone. Last question. I haven't decided on which software is the best to set up basic menus and to burn the disks. Any recommendations?

[yg1968]

miamicanes said:

Spend $200-500 on a prosumer-grade SVHS VCR with internal timebase corrector, active tracking, and digital noise reduction (in effect, offloading the time-consuming task of noise reduction from your PC to a few specialized DSP chips in the VCR).

A number of digital camcorders have a time based corrector that will in effect do the same job (for example the Sony TRV-25). It might be a better investment.