S-VHS to DVD

John10Yes wrote on 1/10/2006, 2:19 PM
I am a new user of VEgas 6.0. I just bought an ADS Capture box after reading a diffferent posting so that I can converts some S-VHS footage to DVD. I captured the footage and did some editing for length but am obviously doing something wrong. When I get all done and put it on a DVD the quality (some color and pixilation) is just not as good as on the tape. What am I doing wrong? What are the proper steps that I should be following?

Comments

winrockpost wrote on 1/10/2006, 2:58 PM
http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/download/step2.asp?DID=391.

This may help
johnmeyer wrote on 1/10/2006, 10:19 PM
1. Capture to Vegas using Firewire input from ADS box. Use S-Video cable into ADS, if available. Otherwise composite will be fine.

2. Edit on Vegas timeline.

3. Render to MPEG-2 using the DVD Architect NTSC (or PAL, if you're in Europe) template. DO NOT use the Default template for MPEG-2. If you do, everything will look lousy. If that's what you did, you are yet another victim of the stupid decision that Sony made to use lousy options for the default. What's worse, the darn program keeps insisting on going back to the Default, so you have to remember to make this change each time.

4. Render the audio separately to an AC-3 file.

5. Bring into DVDA (or other authoring program), and create your DVD. That authoring program should NOT re-encode the MPEG2 file. If it does, you've done something wrong. Re-encoding takes HOURS, whereas the authoring step should take 10-20 minutes (that's how you'll know if it is re-encoding -- which is bad, or just assembling the video as part of the authoring process).
JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/11/2006, 8:58 AM
Just answered your other post on this. ;-) Analog tape has a lot of noise and MPEG compression can’t handle noise very well. I run all my analog tapes through VirtualDub with the Noise Reduction filter. I also crop with black in VirtualDub to remove the noise at the top/bottom of the frame. There is no sense wasting bits encoding that noise since it never gets shown.

Here are some links to this discussion that we’ve had before:

Converting from vhs
Capture in MPEG format?
Smoothing Technique ?

~jr