Posted: Mar 27, 2007 09:49 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi Folks, I'm kinda new to whole A/D video conversion thing and have started trying to convert old VHS tapes to DVD. I'm using a JVC S-VHS > Canopus ADVC 110 > firewire > pc. The software I'm using is Vegas 7.0. I have an HDTV (Panny Plasma, TH-50PH9UK). I know my Frame Rate should be 29.970 (NTSC) and would imagine the Pixel aspect ration should be 0.9091 (NTSV DV). I tried a 1.2121 (NTSC DV Widescreen) test once and the movie ended up looked "squeezed" on my HDTV. Maybe it wouldn't if I checked the "Stretch Video to fill Output Frame size (Do not Letterbox)" option before rendering? I would assume you can't widescreen something that was already created 4:3 like VHS tapes. I see that there are a few different Property settings... Field Order: - None (Progressive Scan) - Lower field first - Upper field first Full resolution rendering quality... - Best - Good - Draft - Preview (I've been going with "Best", but not sure it's any different than "Good") DeInterlace Method... - None - Blend fields - Interpolate fields What's the optimal combination? The VHS is captured to AVI (like a 20 GB file) and when rendered goes to MPEG-2, like 4 GB. On the Audio Tab I've been choosing "Best" for Resample and Stretch Quality - I assume that's fine. Also, when you go to Render you have the option to "Stretch Video to fill Output Frame size (Do not Letterbox)" - Do I need to check that? Is there anything under Options > Preferences I should change? Thanks in advance for any help - it's much appreciated : ) -CW
Boy, how about them crickets over here Well, I've been doinf research else where and found these answers in case anyone is interested... DV devices use Lower field or Bottom Filed I think i seen someone mentioned Vegas uses Mainconcept, the editing application I use also uses mainconcept. Insead of static selections it has a slider. to tell you the truth I don't see a difference in encoding times or quality so I always slide it to 100%. Not sure exactly what it does. Never deinterlace video that's going to be watched on TV. NTSC VHS is 480i/29.97 interlace You are capturing to DV format which is 480i/29.97 interlace. If you want to play to a normal TV or 1080i HDTV, you should stay in 480i/29.97 interlace to the DVD. Tradeoff is bitrate vs. hours per DVD. If your target is a progressive HDTV, the TV will handle the 480i/29.97 to native progressive conversion in hardware better than you can do in software. Certain exceptions apply if you want to get deep into this. If you intend extreme compression or web distribution, different rules apply. Even so, I would encourage you to save the 480i/29.97 master for important material. That works for archive. Cost is fewer minutes/hours per DVD but DVD media is cheap and you will be glad you took the higher road when HDTV is mainstream. When rendering the most important one is bitrate, for 90 minutes you'd be using 6000kbps which is pretty standard. You could try 8000kbps but this will only allow for a 60 minutes on a single layer disc. Whatever you do only encode to MPEG once.
