Anyone converting wrestling?

[filmjax]

I've recently started preserving my collection of wrestling tapes (all the Monday night shows) and am wondering if anyone else is doing the same thing, or has done so in the past?

My original hope was to put one show (roughly 90 mins without commercials) on a VCD. But tests proved this to just be too awful to look at. Now I'm putting two shows onto a DVD at about 3000 with 112 audio. This looks... eh... tolerable. I'm capturing in DV AVI.

I ask specifically about wrestling since there's so much fast motion in a show that it seems like it would be a different conversion process than a normal television show. Anyone have any settings that they use for something like this?

[T-E-M]

So, you're saying your tapes have been played so many times that there are bad spots throughout the majority of the tape? Anyway, capturing to DV AVI, nothing wrong there. I use VirtualDub to open DV AVI files from my DVC. You need the MainConcept DV Demo Codec v2.1.0. for VD to recognise them, though. As for the fast motion, I would select DivX Pro v5.0.2 or 3 and as for the bitrate, probably 1000. I usually do a 2-pass operation through Job Control, one pass to scan the video so it can determine the low and fast motion areas to use a higher or lower bitrate and the second pass to do the actual encoding. I hope this will help you. I am no expert though.

[monoxide77]

i've done this. i found however that putting one show each DVD is the best way to go. putting two shows (about 3 hours+ minus the commercials) gives you all kinds of blockiness. use TMPGenc to encode (2-pass VBR) and set the motion search precision to very slow.
(useless fact: capturing the shows live as they air gives 200% better quality than if you record them to VHS first. i guess you know this but for past shows, you can't help it.) i'm wanting to capture WrestleManiaXIX. this is definitely a 2 disc-er.

[filmjax]

So, you're saying your tapes have been played so many times that there are bad spots throughout the majority of the tape?

No, not at all. Just saying that the length of the show (90-100 mins) combined with the all the rapid movements produces a blocky, crappy VCD. I'm wondering if people have had success with this type of conversion. Perhaps someone has a method that I haven't tried yet.

[filmjax]

i've done this. i found however that putting one show each DVD is the best way to go.

I'd like to do that, but DVDs are still too pricey right now for that to make much sense to me. I'm converting mainly to conserve space in my library. I don't need these shows to be of amazing quality, just as good as they are on the VHS tape.

As soon as I can get a spindle of recordable DVDs for the price of a spindle of recordable DVDs, then I'll do just that.