If it was me, I'd losslessly capture the mpeg2 file and leave it at that. The size will be just a little bigger, the quality will be exactly the same as the DVD, and if you ever use any of it in a new DVD, you can edit (with Womble or VideoRedo) losslessly and put the video on the new DVD without any generation loss. I see no reason to make it into an mp4 other than to deinterlace and put the video online.

Laurence, the reason to make it into an MP4 is for offering it as a downloadable product for purchase. Since the original project files are long gone, I was just trying to determine the best way to preserver the most quality going from MPEG2 to H264.

This is a timely post, as I was thinking of digitizing my DVDs that I burned with my VHS to DVD recorder. I tried MeGUI (too hard to set up), Wondershare (great quality but $50), VOB2MPG (couldn't play it on my media player and Vegas wanted to recompress it when rendering).

Finally settled on Handbrake (great quality, fast and free). In Vegas I overlayed the original VOB file and the Handbrake mp4 file and I couldn't notice much difference in quality. Well, except for the anamorphic cropping Handbrake does, which I subsequently disabled.

Two things though:

1. When I put the Handbrake mp4 into Vegas, I don't see any chapter points even though they were checked off to be included.

2. Is there any point in using Handbrake to "uprez" 720 x 480 to 1920 x 1080?

"[I]...digitizing my DVDs.[/I]"

Your DVDs are already digitized. I sense you are considering making your DVDs [I]more streaming friendly or portable player friendly[/I].

1) If navigation is important to you, then make a Blu-ray or create a Blu-ray image and play it with software. You can put a lot of Standard Definition material on a Blu-ray and you likely won't have to re-encode from your DVD projects. The other options for chapters are less robust than an option that a whole industry has worked out for you.

All that said. I just converted one of my ten-year old DVDs in Handbrake and I'm watching it on my iPad. I don't remember thinking hard about it and it looks good at 2 mbps. The slider bar in the player provides some degree of navigation, if imprecise.

2) Absolutely zero. Let your hardware player do what it does best.

1. Vegas does not recognize mp4/m4v chapters.
You could export them to a text file and reformat as Vegas markers however.
http://yamb.unite-video.com/extract.html

2. The Handbrake GUI will not uprez your video, for the exact reason JD mentioned.

Aldo, the program DVDVOBTOMPG worked famously for converting your DVD video to a properly concatenated MPG file should you need to drop it onto the timeline prior to converting it with HB. If you don't need to do that, then just use Handbrake alone. The whole reason for my post was that on some DVDs, I need to edit on the timeline first for color correction, audio enhancement, etc. before encoding with HB to MP4 format.

Thanks for that, guys.

Mike, I actually would want to do that too. When rendering the .mpg files, what Vegas template do you use to get no recompression on the render?

I have a stack of about 200 DVD's to go through, so I might as well do it right!

Well I haven't converted a DVD just yet, however, when you drop the MPG2 file onto the timeline, your project will be DVD size like 720x480 for NTSC. Then the best thing to do is send it to handbrake with the Vegas2Handbrake script you can find in this forum and let handbrake do the resizing because it does it better than Vegas when encoding to H264.

"
One that you will create and save yourself, exactly matching the source properties, which of course vary from title to title.

Resolution, pixel aspect, frame rate, field order, max and average bitrates. Set minimum bitrate at 2,000,000 for best results.

And but once again, Handbrake GUI will NOT uprez your video past its native Display Aspect, for the exact reason John Dennis mentioned above.There "was" a back door that I think was closed in 0.10.5.

musicvid, are you saying that the vegas project properties need to exactly match the source MPG video, even when encoding via Handbrake (which I think is what he wants to do,, not encode in Vegas, at least that's what he said in a previous post "settled on Handbrake")

The question I quoted and responded to was about "no recompression" in Vegas, and nothing to do with Handbrake, Yes, all those properties must match in order to get
"No Recompression Required." We also refer to this as a "smart render."

http://www.custcenter.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4865/

Handbrake ALWAYS recompresses, with no exceptions. Hope this clears it up.

Yes, it does, thank you for the clarification.

Note that Vegas doesn't properly smart render MPEG2. See my earlier tests:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/showmessage.asp?messageid=915317

Thanks musicvid, that clears it up.