I completed my first project now I want to transfer it to VHS. I have a ATI Video card that has a Video out. My question is, what do I do now? Do I render the project first(what format)?
This project is for a cable tv show so I want the best quality I can get.
You will probably want to render to MPEG at a rather high bitrate; try one of the DVD Best templates. You can also try DV AVI for better quality, but unless you have a very fast processor this won't play back full-screen smoothly. Also it's very helpful to add 5 or 10 seconds of black/silence to the beginning and end of your project. Once that's done, set your video display resolution to 800x600, turn on the TV out of the card, launch Media Player or whatever other MPEG player you prefer, load the MPEG file, start playback and pause immediately, set the media player to full-screen, start the VCR recording, and then un-pause the player.
Easy way is to render to .avi format using whatever codec/compression you want and use Video Capture's full screen mode. This can be enabled/disabled on the Preview Preferences tab and utilizes the Preview on Device and Record to Device buttons on the Print to Tape tab.
It should function very similarly to Media Players full screen. I've tested with the AIW successfully, after getting the right ATI driver installed (may also need to install the Multimedia Center stuff)
Ahhh. That could explain it. I removed all the ATI multimedia software because it was a total dog. Everything on my computer ran slow and i couldn't get any other multimedia stuff to run on my computer while that was installed, and the software itself is just about completely non-functional. For example, the DVD player is supposed to use the hardware MPEG decoding acceleration on the video card, but at best it would only play about 3 frames per second in a half-size window and the audio lags behind in fits and spurts. In comparison, PowerDVD plays full screen full speed in software only.