VHS to DVD Architect

joeysb wrote on 1/8/2008, 7:11 AM
As a novice user, I need some help. I am using a Pioneer DVD recorder to copy 2-hour VHS tapes. Puts them in .mpg format but the files are huge (4GB). I'm then using Vegas Movie Studio to create regions (segments) in .wmv format, which are also huge (about 200MB for a 15 minute segment). Then using these files in DVD Architect to create my final product. But I have to use the "Fit to Disk" option cause again it's too big for a DVD. It's working but is there a quicker or more efficient way?? Thanks.

Comments

bStro wrote on 1/8/2008, 7:38 AM
Believe it or not, 4GB is not that big for a two-hour video. Rather small, actually, relatively speaking.

Are you doing any actual editing of the files in Vegas Movie Studio or are you just chopping it up into pieces? If the latter, you might want to just skip that step and take the original MPEG file right into DVD Architect Studio. It'll accept a 4GB file just fine, and any "segmenting" you want to do can be done there.

With your current workflow, you're going from MPEG to WMV and back to MPEG, which is, to be frank, pretty inefficient and is likely having an adverse effect on the quality of your video. If you don't need to do these conversions, you shouldn't.

On the other hand, if you're actually editing the files in anyway (other than "creating regions"), you may still want to change your workflow a bit by either a) using an editing app that's better with MPEGs (Vegas Movie Studio = not so good at that) or b) using a different method to digitize your tapes to a less compressed format like DV AVI. (These files are much bigger, but they are more efficient to work with).

Rob
MPM wrote on 1/8/2008, 9:16 AM
joeysb, I'd strongly suggest that you spend some serious time at sites like videohelp.com & doom9.org , reading guides and browsing forums to get a better feel for working with video. No offense intended -- at all :-) -- but there are simply too many choices, possible work-flows, software alternatives, and just general gotcha's to watch out for... No forum thread could begin to scratch the surface. TO give an idea:...

Using a DVDR you can use the mpg2 as is, including editing without re-encoding. You can edit the mpg2 -- either actual files or a proxy -- & re-encode. You can include filtering -- might be a help with a VHS source. You can use wmv if you set the encoding parameters right, and not suffer a lot of quality loss, but as Rob posted, it carries a heavy price when it comes to efficiency -- better to use a proxy and not have an intermediate at all IMHO. You can use software that'll do much of any conversion for you, or do it step by step manually. And then there's the audio (probably ac3) which probably should be converted to wav & then re-encoded if you're doing serious editing.

OR, at it's simplest:
You can use PgcDemux to get the individual ac3 & mpg2 files, and just plug those into DVDA.