You certainly will not get scene detection of analog footage by using Vegas. It may create scene breaks if the analog signal completely goes away, and this may have some limited value. However, to get scene detection during the majority of your video where the signal doesn't completely disappear, you need to try one of the alternatives that Spot recommends. Also, if your analog tape has sections without any signal whatsoever, Vegas capture (and any other capture app) may also drop a bunch of frames at that point. Don't fret if this happens; it is normal. Also, depending on the preferences you set for the capture application, these dropped frames may cause the capture to stop altogether. If you walk away and then come back in an hour, you may find you only have a few minutes of video captured, even though your tape has been playing away. The solution is to tell the capture application to ignore dropped frames.

But don't the dropped frames over time get the audio and video out of synch?
In other words, put a 2 hour 8mm tape through a Sony Camcorder that does the A->D conversion; where there are "dirty" transitions on the 8mm tape, Vegas capture will drop frames. My experience is that this results in substantial out-of-synch audio, which is why I never allow the "ignore dropped frame" setting.

Opinions?

Thanks,
Bob.

Use Scenalyzer. You won't have the problem.

I've never noticed a sync problem with dropped frames. What i see is the last valid frame before the problem is duplicated for each frame that can't be captured. Sync is maintained. I've had some captures a couple hours long that may have had a few hundred dropped frames at a few places. Sync was still frame accurate through to the end.

Of course, this may be dependant on what DV converter is being used. I've got a SONY DVMC-DA2 (sadly discontinued), so i can't vouch for what happens with other devices.

Thanks for the advice...

So far Vegas seems to be doing pretty decent scene detection but I have two other questions...

1) The bottom 5 or 10 lines are very "blurry" (I'm not sure how to describe it... it's kind of how a tape looks with rolling lines). It's on almost every capture of mine. Can I somehow get rid of this? I can post an example if needed...

2) Should I "enhance" these captures in any way before moving them to DVD? Capturing 2 hours per 8mm tape is VERY time-consuming, and once I move them to DVD I doubt I'll ever re-edit them (because I'd need to re-capture them before editting so I don't lose quality). I'm wondering if any sort of filter exists I guess to clean up the pictures.... (or should I just leave them as straight captures)

Thanks!

The bottom 5 or 10 lines are very "blurry"...

That's a standard problem with analog video.
Odds are that (due to overscan) you won't see it on your TV.
If you want to get rid of it, the easiest thing is to apply a black mask along this portion.

Mike

The blur at the bottom is most likely a tape tracking problem.

Can you adjust playback tracking on your 8mm cam (not likely, but...)?

The alternative is to get a separate deck that has this capability.

A TBC (Time Base Corrector) can also help with old tapes, the larger Canopus A/D boxes have this built-in.

The 8mm camcorder I'm using is very old and has almost zero options... (unfortunately I can't justify buying a seperate deck for this project)

As for using a black bar, wouldn't that only change the display from being blurry to pure black? (assuming the overscan on the TV was not enough to hide this part of the image) I'm not sure if the viewer would rather see black or "blurry" lines...

As mentioned earlier, the edges of the image probably won't be seen on most TVs, so it won't matter to your viewers whether the edges are black or not.

However, there is one other consideration. If you're rendering to a more compressed format such as MPEG for DVDs, the less image that has to be compressed, the better and clearer the rest will be. Replacing the fuzzies around the edge with solid black will allow the whole image to compress with better quality.

Ok, that leads me to my question about improving the picture quality...

I'm going to create DVDs out of these 8mm captures but I'm unsure if I should just let DVD Architect 3 do the work or should I use Vegas to render it to MPEG-2 first?

If I use Vegas to render to MPEG-2, should I apply any other filters to improve image quality? (color correcter, levels, etc?) I'm not good with color correction so any "automatic" filters would be best... (the Color Correcter set to "Studio RGB to Computer RGB" seems to look pretty good...)

Definitely let Vegas do it as you can do a variable 2 pass encode from there and adjust your bitrate accordingly- johnmeyer has a bitrate calculator that you can use- just do a search for "bitrate calculator" and it should come up. Bitrate improves quality.
As for color correction. Any preset is nice in its own right, but there are no cookie cutter solutions for color as no one has the same color issues. Your shoot location was different than mine. What correction I come up with (or what preset I tweak) may look horrible on yours. You will have to play around and save one that you think will help the majority of your clips (or use multiple corrections) Just note, it will take a lot longer on the render time.
There are some filters and fx on Vasst.com that are free for the download. You can play around with them, but secondary color correction (already a part of Vegas) has helped me out numerous times- just adjust to your liking.

j razz

Thanks again for all of the help... (and sorry for asking so many questions)

My only remaining confusion is about the bitrate. I understand the higher the bitrate the better the quality, but how (and why) would I use a bitrate calculator? Do I use it so I can store as much video on a DVD as possible? (I thought a DVD could only store a standard 2 hours or something like that....)

The size of the rendered MPEG2 file is determined by the duration and the bitrate. You want to use to use up the entire DVD with the highest bitrate possible to maximize the quality. However, the longer your video is, the lower the bitrate you'll have to use to fit it on the disc. A DVD can hold about 2 hours at 5Mbps or 1.5 hours at 6.6Mbps or 3 hours at 3.3Mbps. These are only approximate values. The actual bitrate necessary will probably be somewhat less depending on the audio format and amount of space you use up for menues.

Well, all of my clips are fairly short (45 minutes or less) so I plan to put several clips on each DVD.

However, which bitrate should I use for 8mm --> DV AVI files? The quality is already quite poor because it was 8mm so wouldn't 7.5 Mbps be overkill? (maybe even 5.5 Mbps would be overkill?)