I think you have to render your MPEG-2 file back to DV and play it back out to your VCR. Or use a DVD player hooked up to your VCR.

I'd like to see if it's possible for SoFo to allow the Print to Tape feature of the Capture Utility to use MPEG-2 files as well as DV (AVI) files. Right now it only uses AVI files, if I'm correct.

Ron

So you believe bringing the MPEG-2 to DV and then out to tape again will degrade quality?

Agree wholeheartedly. It would be great if Vegas could play MPEG-2 files for lots of reasons.

Render the DV-AVI from the project timeline. Then open the AVI in VV3 and play it while recording on your VCR.

Because of the compression process MPEG-2 is already degraded in quality from the original material. If the VHS tapes will have your name on them and you want them to look fairly decent, make a new DV-AVI from the finished project.

I'd figured that was the case. Thanks for the reality check.

WT

You lose so much quality going to VHS that minor quality issues with mpeg 2 compression are irrelevant. Here's what I do:

I make a special DVD with no menu, a video clip of 10 seconds of black at the beginning, the video, then another clip of black. I use this as a "master" in my DVD/VHS Daewoo combo deck. I put in a new VHS tape and hit the "copy" button. Voila: as good a VHS tape as you can get!

Two notes: First, a realtime speed duplicated VHS is better than the super high speed dupes that you get in commercial VHS tapes.

Second, The Daewoo is my third DVD/VHS combo deck. The Daewoo is specifically DVD-R compatible and will play back even cheap DVD-Rs with nary a glitch. The Go-Video and Samsung models I tried and returned played back high quality DVD-Rs pretty well, but they would occasionally glitch slightly even under the best conditions. The last thing I wanted was VHS tapes that I had to check for glitches.

When I print to VHS tape, I just use the external monitor feature in the video preview. Set quality to best, and play the timeline out the firewire port. Hook up a VHS deck to the output of the DV deck and it works great.

We started acquiring on MiniDV this summer and mastering to DVD-R. I simply put our video clip into the "first play" slot on the authoring software and burn away. When I need to make dupes of student tapes, I grab the DVD master and pop it into the DVD player which is connected to our VHS dubbing rack. It's quick and easy, and I've been pleasently surprised with the quality.
-D

Wow, what a great cross section of experience to pick from. I should have mentioned that I'm not going straight to VHS, but will be sendong a replicator a Mini DV for replication. What I'm doing now as a test, is rendering some of my chapters out of Vegas as best quality DV, and laying the other chapters from the DVD player back to DV tape using the Dazzle Hollywood bridge. I then capture the DV footage in Vegas and I'll work on it from there. If the recaptured DVD footage looks problematic, I'll render the rest of the chapters and replace the sub-par events to retain all my edits.

One question for JAB: when you print to tape using the external monitor feature, how can you get smooth playback, especially set to "Best"? I've never been able to get glitchless playback to an esternal monitor, even at "Preview" setting.

WT

Well, I'm not sure what I'm doing to get it smooth. I just went back and did a little test to see if I could give you some specifics and found that I can't see any difference between draft and best quality. It is equally smooth at all settings. I have always used a fully rendered .avi file for laybacks. Maybe that's what does it. No edits in the timeline. Set the zoom level to full so that the entire video is visible to prevent scrolling in the timeline during playback. I have a P4 1.8ghz machine with 512mb DDR playing through a generic IEE1394 card to a JVC GR-DVL820. I hook up any analog source, TV, VCR, whatever and it looks perfect. Anyone else doing this?

One other thought, I ALWAYS render to .AVI for my final fully edited product. If I want other formats, I render from that .AVI.

Just as an aside while we're all commenting on this -
For friends and relatives I Print to Tape then record to VHS - VHS of course is really stretching a friendship and the sooner it dies the better - I always grit my teeth as I'm checking the VHS tape. I also use the S-Video connector - does this make a noticeable difference? Hard to tell - but anything that might help with VHS is worth a try. And this is PAL - I'd hate to use NTSC.
But what i want to say is that is that S-VHS gives splendid results in what appears to be only marginally different from playing the DV tape direct to the TV. I leave these S-VHS "masters" around for familiy and visitors to watch and I don't need to grit my teeth. To me the S-VHS seems to be better than SVCD (I use the TMPG standard template). I don't intend to buy a DVD burner until A) the dust settles and B) the price is cheap enough so that my wife doesn't see it on the credit card statement.

More pregnant replies. This forum is getting downright dangerous.

To JAB:I’m prety sure the absence of transitions is what makes it work. I get smooth playback too when it only fully rendered video. Any reason to do it this way and not with the official print command in Vidcap? Same results as fara as I can see.

To mfh: I bet you’re not in the US. Not too many S-VHS players in living rooms here. As far as DVD goes, I’m sold. I got a Mac(!!!) with a “superdrive” (Pioneer A-103, I think) and love the results. These drives are going for under $1k and discs are less than $8.

Thanks for the thoughtful replies.

WT

Right before we got our NLE setup and our digital camera we had to tape a class with a Panasonci AG456 SVHS camera. I dumped it through our DV deck and into the firewire card for editing and was pleasantly surprised at the quality. It seemed to hold up much better than standard VHS and tons easier to edit.
-D