Video editing solution? Burning to DVD?
- Thread starter Santilli
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sechs
Storage? I am Storage!
The difficult part is hardware; appropriate software can be had for cheap or free.
Do you have a plan for connecting the VHS player to your computer?
Do you have a plan for connecting the VHS player to your computer?
I'd say it's not too complex. If you've got the hardware to capture video (as sechs pointed out), there are a variety of tools you can use to encode and then burn to DVD. If you want something more complex like a dvd menu system, then you might have to shell out some money for an authoring tool.
Take a look at TMPGenc for an encoding tool.
www.doom9.org has plenty of information on encoding DVD's (look at the guides section). http://www.videohelp.com/ also has tons of information on the subject.
Take a look a TMPGEnc MPEG Editor for creating DVD's.
You can also use adobe encore, but it's expensive.
There is also ulead dvd creator. I have this software (it came with my pioneer A06) and I'm not very thrilled with it. It gets the job done, but I always feel like I'm missing something important. It's like the software is hiding advanced features that most people don't want to see, but I'd like to use.
Overall I use Nero 5.5 to burn my authored DVD's. The first couple times I played with Uleads software, I couldn't get it to burn to my pioneer, so I created the DVD layout, and then used nero to burn the actual DVD. The newer version of nero has some more tools if you're interested.
Take a look at TMPGenc for an encoding tool.
www.doom9.org has plenty of information on encoding DVD's (look at the guides section). http://www.videohelp.com/ also has tons of information on the subject.
Take a look a TMPGEnc MPEG Editor for creating DVD's.
You can also use adobe encore, but it's expensive.
There is also ulead dvd creator. I have this software (it came with my pioneer A06) and I'm not very thrilled with it. It gets the job done, but I always feel like I'm missing something important. It's like the software is hiding advanced features that most people don't want to see, but I'd like to use.
Overall I use Nero 5.5 to burn my authored DVD's. The first couple times I played with Uleads software, I couldn't get it to burn to my pioneer, so I created the DVD layout, and then used nero to burn the actual DVD. The newer version of nero has some more tools if you're interested.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Santilli said:
All the programs that make DVD, that I have found, are at least somewhat buggy.
That said, these are my recommendations:
Get a cheap Leadtek or other Conexant-based TV tuner/capture card ($30). Cheap in this case DOES NOT MEAN BAD.
Get a DVD burner. I'm partial to liteon models. ($50ish)
Get a copy of Ulead DVD Moviefactory v3 (uh.. I got an OEM copy somewhere... it's probably $50t).
Buy appropriate cables (about $5).
I teach whole class on this stuff.
The nice thing about current versions of Ulead is that MPEG is the default capture format. Makes everything a lot easier to make into DVDs.
If your PC is too slow to handle the on the fly MPEG conversion, use a Plextor ConvertX hardware encoder instead ($120).
It's not NEARLY as expensive to do this stuff as it was a couple years ago.
Before you shell out $50ish on Ulead, give the free trial of TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6 a go.
For clarification, my comments regarding Ulead movie factory are againsts version 2. Merc suggested version 3 which I have not used. Ulead also has a free trial you should consider.
For clarification, my comments regarding Ulead movie factory are againsts version 2. Merc suggested version 3 which I have not used. Ulead also has a free trial you should consider.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
You can somewhat enhance video on the fly if you use ATI's capture app with an ATI card, but the Conexant TV cards are cheap and work as well for VHS tape. Honest.
Bozo
Storage? I am Storage!
ATI has a video capture card (PCI) that sells for ~$49.00. Comes with software too.
Nero also has software to convert and burn to DVD.
Bozo :mrgrn:
Nero also has software to convert and burn to DVD.
Bozo :mrgrn:
can't really comment on the price, but I do note that Newegg sells the card for more. There are a bunch of other TV cards using the same components as yours, and would tend to be cheaper (Leadtek, MSI), as ATI ususally is priced higher. However, getting functional drivers from these other co.'s can be another thing. Not certain what the current state is, but given that the CX2388x chip has been around for a while, I would think that its probably a level playing field now in the Windows realm. In terms of quality, your good to go, as the CX2388x decoders are good chips.
can't comment on the ATI software, but Merc certainly gives it his approval. If your unsatisfied by it, there are 3rd party apps that should work.
Up to 125 channels can be recieved by the cards front end (i.e. the tuner and the demodulator). This of course requires that 125 channels exist on your analog cable line or are available OTA -- I think my cable line has about 75 channels (about 35 basic, and the rest require ponying up mullah), and over the air, I probably could pick up ~25 channels with the most basic of antennas.
Bozo
Storage? I am Storage!
The ATI card that I have is the lower (~$40) priced model. Almost a year old now. The higher priced card came with a remote control.
As far as software goes, I havn't used the card/software in some time now and I forget what/how I converted from VHS to DVD. When I get home I'll check the box that has the setup installed in it.
Bozo :mrgrn:
As far as software goes, I havn't used the card/software in some time now and I forget what/how I converted from VHS to DVD. When I get home I'll check the box that has the setup installed in it.
Bozo :mrgrn:
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
Just curious, because someone I know wants to do just the above, but what's the cheapest card to do the above among ATI's line-up? A 9200 All-In-Wonder? He has a Pentium 4 1.5GHz and 768MB of SDRAM. Does he need more?Mercutio said:
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Anything newer than an 8500, Coug.
VideoSoap isn't THAT impressive and only works with ATI's MMC.
VideoSoap isn't THAT impressive and only works with ATI's MMC.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Multimedia console. It's the catch-all for ATI's video viewing and capture applications.
Bozo
Storage? I am Storage!
I used a program called Intervideo.
But I must be going brain dead as I don't remember any of the details.
Bozo :mrgrn:
But I must be going brain dead as I don't remember any of the details.
Bozo :mrgrn:
blakerwry
Storage? I am Storage!
card and software suck last time I took a look. Nothing really bad with the hardware, except for maybe hardware conflicts... Required a slipstreamed install if using 2k or XP.. ATi didt realease 2k ro XP drivers until a year or two after the realease of these operating systems.. so the software support is ass, hardware is ok.
Jake the Dog
Storage is cool
hey there Misterilli (and hello to all of you 
)
do you have a DV flavour camcorder? if so, chances are you can capture your VCR's composite signal via the camcorder DV output and the video quality will be as good as almost any consumer level analogue capture hardware device (often better.) if this is not an option then I too recommend the Plextor ConvertX Merc suggested. it does indeed capture reliably and maintains good A/V sync.
for capturing DV, WinDV is a handy little (92KB!) DV tool worth checking out. for analogue video capture, both VirtualDub and Virtual VCR are great little (AVI) cappers. these three proggies are imho real gems as they are also free. afaik, they should work fine with your system.
basically there's a two ways you can go about VHS to DVD conversion. a quick and easy way and the not so quick and easy way. the first is to save captured video direct to DVD compliant MPEG, which is easily authored and burnt to DVD. the second involves an additional step of processing the captured video before authoring & burning to DVD. this allows you to clean up and generally improve the quality of video before putting onto DVD. doing this doesn't necessarily have to be laborious and complicated, but it just as easily can be, depending on how much processing you do. processing large video files are CPU and disk I/O intensive tasks, even for dual Xeons and fast drives :wink:
it's well worth processing video though as old VHS tapes are pretty much a poor quality video source and the capture process doesn't improve it any and potentially makes it worse. you can mitigate most of this by using a decent capture device, cleaning the VCR's heads and using a reasonable quality, shielded composite cable. whilst a premium cable won't provide any benefit, cheapies can and often do add noise and other artefacts and generally further reduce video quality.
for a good "one-stop-shop" video tool let me suggest to you MainConcept's EVE v2 (US$55.) it's a capper/editor/author/burner in one that's quite easy to use and yet provides decent DVD MPEG results as it uses MainConcept's excellent MPEG encoder (not surprisingly.) it's a good value for money product imho.
if you're going process your video first then your best saving your caps in a DV format (eg AVI) using something like Panasonic's free DV codec which more than good enough for VHS caps. alternatively, the Huffyuv codec is fast and lossless but occasionally needs re-configuring to make it work with various video processing tools. you can process MPEG video just as you can DV but as it's a highly compressed and lossy format it's slow to process and destructive to video quality each time it's rendered.
for DV processing I recommend VirtualDub. VirtualDub has a large filter developer base and heaps of excellent filters that will clean up your VHS caps before encoding to DVD MPEG. (http://www.compression.ru/video/index_en.htm is a good source of decent filters.) for ease of use, TMPGEnc XPress and EVE v2 are good but offer relatively few filters. of note is TMPGEnc XPress' de-noise filter which is remarkably good and better than a lot of supposedly professional level de-noisers. TMPGEnc's MPEG encoder is also worth noting as being excellent.
I’m not a fan of Ulead's video tools. they might be easy to use and have sensible video creation wizards for novices, their products tend to be unstable when pushed and render speeds, particularly for MPEG is awful. resultant quality isn't that crash hot either.
finally, for authoring and burning to DVD, I'll second Handy's TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6 motion. it's easy to use, does a good job of producing simple menus and burns to DVD. version 1.6 now supports DL DVD’s.
well I hope I haven't confused and possibly even helped!
cheers,
Tim
)do you have a DV flavour camcorder? if so, chances are you can capture your VCR's composite signal via the camcorder DV output and the video quality will be as good as almost any consumer level analogue capture hardware device (often better.) if this is not an option then I too recommend the Plextor ConvertX Merc suggested. it does indeed capture reliably and maintains good A/V sync.
for capturing DV, WinDV is a handy little (92KB!) DV tool worth checking out. for analogue video capture, both VirtualDub and Virtual VCR are great little (AVI) cappers. these three proggies are imho real gems as they are also free. afaik, they should work fine with your system.
basically there's a two ways you can go about VHS to DVD conversion. a quick and easy way and the not so quick and easy way. the first is to save captured video direct to DVD compliant MPEG, which is easily authored and burnt to DVD. the second involves an additional step of processing the captured video before authoring & burning to DVD. this allows you to clean up and generally improve the quality of video before putting onto DVD. doing this doesn't necessarily have to be laborious and complicated, but it just as easily can be, depending on how much processing you do. processing large video files are CPU and disk I/O intensive tasks, even for dual Xeons and fast drives :wink:
it's well worth processing video though as old VHS tapes are pretty much a poor quality video source and the capture process doesn't improve it any and potentially makes it worse. you can mitigate most of this by using a decent capture device, cleaning the VCR's heads and using a reasonable quality, shielded composite cable. whilst a premium cable won't provide any benefit, cheapies can and often do add noise and other artefacts and generally further reduce video quality.
for a good "one-stop-shop" video tool let me suggest to you MainConcept's EVE v2 (US$55.) it's a capper/editor/author/burner in one that's quite easy to use and yet provides decent DVD MPEG results as it uses MainConcept's excellent MPEG encoder (not surprisingly.) it's a good value for money product imho.
if you're going process your video first then your best saving your caps in a DV format (eg AVI) using something like Panasonic's free DV codec which more than good enough for VHS caps. alternatively, the Huffyuv codec is fast and lossless but occasionally needs re-configuring to make it work with various video processing tools. you can process MPEG video just as you can DV but as it's a highly compressed and lossy format it's slow to process and destructive to video quality each time it's rendered.
for DV processing I recommend VirtualDub. VirtualDub has a large filter developer base and heaps of excellent filters that will clean up your VHS caps before encoding to DVD MPEG. (http://www.compression.ru/video/index_en.htm is a good source of decent filters.) for ease of use, TMPGEnc XPress and EVE v2 are good but offer relatively few filters. of note is TMPGEnc XPress' de-noise filter which is remarkably good and better than a lot of supposedly professional level de-noisers. TMPGEnc's MPEG encoder is also worth noting as being excellent.
I’m not a fan of Ulead's video tools. they might be easy to use and have sensible video creation wizards for novices, their products tend to be unstable when pushed and render speeds, particularly for MPEG is awful. resultant quality isn't that crash hot either.
finally, for authoring and burning to DVD, I'll second Handy's TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6 motion. it's easy to use, does a good job of producing simple menus and burns to DVD. version 1.6 now supports DL DVD’s.
well I hope I haven't confused and possibly even helped!
cheers,
Tim
Pradeep
Storage? I am Storage!
Jake the Dog said:hey there Misterilli (and hello to all of you
do you have a DV flavour camcorder? if so, chances are you can capture your VCR's composite signal via the camcorder DV output and the video quality will be as good as almost any consumer level analogue capture hardware device (often better.) Tim
Hey JTD, long time no see. Not many of the DV camcorders have an auxiliary analog input, the one's that come to mind are the Digital8 line from Sony, and a few others.
Jake the Dog
Storage is cool
heya Pradeep.
you're right in that there's not that many DV camcorders auxiliary analogue inputs quite a few accept analogue video in on their their A/V connection. this can be said for Canon, Panny, Sony, JVC and Samsung DV camcorders. since much of the electronics required to convert digital>analogue video will work the other way, it's not hard to implement though it's still often omitted from entry level units.
Pradeep said:
you're right in that there's not that many DV camcorders auxiliary analogue inputs quite a few accept analogue video in on their their A/V connection. this can be said for Canon, Panny, Sony, JVC and Samsung DV camcorders. since much of the electronics required to convert digital>analogue video will work the other way, it's not hard to implement though it's still often omitted from entry level units.
Pradeep
Storage? I am Storage!
Damn, I never thought about that!
Sorry to hear you have another 4 years of Little Johnnie
Sorry to hear you have another 4 years of Little Johnnie
Santilli
Hairy Aussie
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Well, just reconfigured the machine, and put the card in. Updated Direct X, did the install with the latest drivers, etc. Connected to the TV in, but it doesn't seem to like this. Instead of acting like a TV, and playing the video, the Wonder card gives me a screen for a second, then goes blue screen.
The manual suggests to connect a VCR using a S-video connection.
I guess the real question is: What is the easiest, and best, way of connecting the VCR to the computer? Once that's done, how do you do the video capture?
Buying another S-video cable is NOT my idea of fun...
s
The manual suggests to connect a VCR using a S-video connection.
I guess the real question is: What is the easiest, and best, way of connecting the VCR to the computer? Once that's done, how do you do the video capture?
Buying another S-video cable is NOT my idea of fun...
s
Santilli
Hairy Aussie
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I pulled the ATI card, since it would only start to read the vcr input using the VCR I was using, and it's coaxial cable.
I've gone over this thread a number of times, and the situation appears thus:
With the VCRS I have, the connection is the problem. I'm going to have to use the 4 head from the living room, with an S connector, and the cables I have out there, all monster stuff, that on repricing, is absurdly expensive.
I decided to get the Plextor
http://www.plextor.com/english/products/ConvertX2.htm
and it was 127 dollars from Dell.
I'll use the cables, and VCR I have, and give it a shot.
I wasn't jazzed about the USB 2 connection, but, if I'm correct, the Sonnet
Trio is USB 2. We'll see if it works. Also, the usb ports on the Supermicro X5DA8 are supposed to support USB 2.
Once I get the video into the computer, I'm going to give some of the filters a try. More to follow.
s
I've gone over this thread a number of times, and the situation appears thus:
With the VCRS I have, the connection is the problem. I'm going to have to use the 4 head from the living room, with an S connector, and the cables I have out there, all monster stuff, that on repricing, is absurdly expensive.
I decided to get the Plextor
http://www.plextor.com/english/products/ConvertX2.htm
and it was 127 dollars from Dell.
I'll use the cables, and VCR I have, and give it a shot.
I wasn't jazzed about the USB 2 connection, but, if I'm correct, the Sonnet
Trio is USB 2. We'll see if it works. Also, the usb ports on the Supermicro X5DA8 are supposed to support USB 2.
Once I get the video into the computer, I'm going to give some of the filters a try. More to follow.
s
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Remember to install all the updates and stuff off plextor's site before you get going.
Santilli
Hairy Aussie
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To start with, the WinDVDCreator and Matrox 3 screen utility conflict, shutting down WinDVD creator. I'm using the updated version, and, so far, it seems to work well, after I use task manager to turn off the Matrox utility.
Most of what I have are old fight films, or a few rare home movies of myself surfing.
Wondering which of the filters are going to work to sharpen and increase the quality of the videos?
Have to go back up, and check which to use.
GS
Most of what I have are old fight films, or a few rare home movies of myself surfing.
Wondering which of the filters are going to work to sharpen and increase the quality of the videos?
Have to go back up, and check which to use.
GS
Santilli
Hairy Aussie
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Minor drag:
:
"Can I use other video editing software with the PX-M402U?
As of April 1, 2004, only InterVideo WinDVD Creator has been qualified by Plextor to capture video from the PX-M402U. Video editing software from Ulead, Roxio, Pinnacle, Virtual Dub and others can edit files captured from the PX-M402U, but can not yet capture directly from the device. Before purchasing any other video editing software to use with the PX-M402U, consult the software provider to confirm which version of their software is compatible with the product. Also, always download the latest PX-M402U driver and software updates for the latest fixes that may affect compatibility."
Still, it's not bad, and has minimal basic features for sharpening, changing contrast, color, brightness, etc, basic monitor stuff, and this helped with the fight fil stuff. Sharpening seems to really heple the poor video quality.
VirtualDub appears to be out for the above reason, along with their array of filters.
Aside from the conflict with Matrox Helpdesk software, it seems to be working, alebit slowly. Input is at real time, and currently making a movie is taking about 40% of processors, with real good spikes, like 80% on two of those processors, and the playback is in slow motion. So, it took about an hour and 20 minutes for input, and, it's going to take at least double that to creat the movie. After it's created, it has to be written to disk, which should be another hour. Also just realized that I may need to free all avaliable space on the raid, so the program can write to it. Moving files to ATA 6 drive currently.
Ran out of room on my 160 gig, so did some house cleaning...
s
:
"Can I use other video editing software with the PX-M402U?
As of April 1, 2004, only InterVideo WinDVD Creator has been qualified by Plextor to capture video from the PX-M402U. Video editing software from Ulead, Roxio, Pinnacle, Virtual Dub and others can edit files captured from the PX-M402U, but can not yet capture directly from the device. Before purchasing any other video editing software to use with the PX-M402U, consult the software provider to confirm which version of their software is compatible with the product. Also, always download the latest PX-M402U driver and software updates for the latest fixes that may affect compatibility."
Still, it's not bad, and has minimal basic features for sharpening, changing contrast, color, brightness, etc, basic monitor stuff, and this helped with the fight fil stuff. Sharpening seems to really heple the poor video quality.
VirtualDub appears to be out for the above reason, along with their array of filters.
Aside from the conflict with Matrox Helpdesk software, it seems to be working, alebit slowly. Input is at real time, and currently making a movie is taking about 40% of processors, with real good spikes, like 80% on two of those processors, and the playback is in slow motion. So, it took about an hour and 20 minutes for input, and, it's going to take at least double that to creat the movie. After it's created, it has to be written to disk, which should be another hour. Also just realized that I may need to free all avaliable space on the raid, so the program can write to it. Moving files to ATA 6 drive currently.
Ran out of room on my 160 gig, so did some house cleaning...
s
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
The Plextor unit only works with WinDVD Creator and a lightweight tool on Plextor's site. It caps directly to MPEG. There shouldn't BE any conversion, unless you want to put stuff in AVI format to use in some crappy old editing program. You can open the MPEG files it makes in just shy of anything, but more than likely, the resulting file will be saved as an AVI, and then you'll have to convert back into MPEG if you want to make a DVD, and that's basically retarded.
Santilli
Hairy Aussie
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I think the step after the mpg capture allows you to edit, combine, and insert menus and words, creating a movie. The make movie part puts the different parts together. Without splitting up the video, you don't end up with any go to features, just one huge file that you have to fast forward through to change places.
It takes more time, but if you cut the units up, it's easier, and a bit better.
You do have a pretty extensive bunch of formats, depending upon compression, and features, to finalize the DVD in. I did DivX on my Clay-Ali first one, and it took a REALLY long time, like 5 hours, to move formats. I might just same save in MPG, as you suggest, with minimum compression, and see how they play.
Doing Carlos Monzon right now. More later.
By the way, the results are better then the original, and I still need a head cleaner for the VCR.
s
It takes more time, but if you cut the units up, it's easier, and a bit better.
You do have a pretty extensive bunch of formats, depending upon compression, and features, to finalize the DVD in. I did DivX on my Clay-Ali first one, and it took a REALLY long time, like 5 hours, to move formats. I might just same save in MPG, as you suggest, with minimum compression, and see how they play.
Doing Carlos Monzon right now. More later.
By the way, the results are better then the original, and I still need a head cleaner for the VCR.
s
Santilli
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Apparently the long conversion time, from mpg to DivX, was due to the compression of the video. Saving the mpg in the standard, non-compressed one hour for 4.7 gig DVD format took much less time. About 30-45 minutes. That gives you files that you can burn to DVD using any burning program, or play with any program, and, since it doesn't appear you can do it quickly using WinDVD Creator, that's a big deal.
The quality of the DVD output is slightly better then the original VHS tape, as well.
Overall, it takes about 4 hours to create a 1 hour DVD, but, the results are way cool, having menu, and chapters, and no compression.
Good solution.
s
The quality of the DVD output is slightly better then the original VHS tape, as well.
Overall, it takes about 4 hours to create a 1 hour DVD, but, the results are way cool, having menu, and chapters, and no compression.
Good solution.
s
Santilli
Hairy Aussie
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Also, a much faster burner, and media, would also help. The Sony DRU-530A writes around 2x most of the time, with 4x Sony media, and very conservative writing settings. Tradeoff is very few coasters. However, an 8X writer, with 8X media might be a much better, if more costly, solution.
s
s
Pradeep
Storage? I am Storage!
Make sure you are running the latest firmware for the Sony drive (2.1c). It should give you max burns of 8x.
http://sony.storagesupport.com/dvdrw/dru530adwn.htm
Also try some cheaper, faster media. I have had good results with Verbatim 16x rated DVD+R.
http://sony.storagesupport.com/dvdrw/dru530adwn.htm
Also try some cheaper, faster media. I have had good results with Verbatim 16x rated DVD+R.