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12-04-2014, 04:23 PM
GaryG45 GaryG45 is offline
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Hi,
I’m preparing to restart a project to transfer video clips from 11 VHS-C tapes and one VHS tape to DVDs. When I originally started this project about a year ago, I didn’t have a working VCR, so I took the advice of some friends and purchased a VCR/DVD Recorder combo unit. I created DVDs using the combo unit and used VOB2MPG to create MPEG2s on my laptop from the DVDs. A lot of the MPEG2s had multiple video clips/scenes in one MPEG. I purchased Corel’s VideoStudio Pro X5 to create individual video clips, and for each clip I added a 25 second title. When I started to create DVDs from the video clips, I noticed some color issues with some of the clips. I found this forum and another one when looking for ways to improve the clips, and that is also when I learned using the combo unit was probably the worst thing to do. Therefore I decided to start over.

Reading through the majority of the guides, I believe I’ve determined what to do. I’ve sent the VHS-C tapes and VHS tape to a company I’ve used to transfer my Video8 tapes to DVDs, and they are going to create AVI files from the tapes.

After I receive the files, I plan to edit the clips and add titles. I don’t know if I can use Womble MPEG-VCR, Womble MPEG Video Wizard, or if I should use another tool to edit the AVI files.

Use TMPGEnc Authoring Works 5 to perform authoring.

Use ImgBurn to burn the DVDs.

I’d like to have suggestions for what to use to edit the AVI files and any comments on my proposed workflow and tools. Sorry if I missed a guide about editing AVI files or don’t understand some things correctly. I don’t know the specs for the AVI files. I’m running Windows 7 SP1 on a laptop with 4GB memory. If you need any further information, please let me know. Thanks in advance for your help.

Gary
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  #2  
12-04-2014, 08:47 PM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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Welcome.

Yes, I say you've missed quite a few forum threads on "editing", some of which are currently underway. In any case, let's see if I can get a little more clarity at the outset. You say the tapes are being captured to "AVI". AVI is a container, not a codec, and it can accept files encoded in many different ways. If you sent 10 tapes and a VHS, your AVIs will return as a sizeable amount of media if they were encoded to lossless compression (which would run about 25GB per hour of video, give or take a few GB's each). You'll get smaller files if they were captured to lossy codecs such as DV-AVI, DivX, Xvid, MJPEG, MOV, etc. -- at a quality cost and with some compression artifacts that can be more or less not-too-obtrusive on a 19" HDTV, but easily noticed from 32" on up.

If by "edit" you mean tacking on some titles and simple cut and join operations, that wouldn't cause much damage in an editor. If you're doing any more than that (color correct, adding subtitles, cropping, masking, getting rid of the usual analog artifacts such as chroma noise, rainbows, dropouts, rips, ripples, dots, spots, DCT ringing, edge ghosting, streaks, and all the other stuff that always shows up on analog tape), you'll quickly lose faith in the typical "editor" (which does nothing to repair the usual defects) and the quality loss that results from re-encoding lossy encoded video through multiple filtering operations. In that case, it's better to work with lossless media. If the AVIs were made with lossy compression there's nothing you can do to reverse it, but you can prevent further damage by decoding them to lossless format. The only re-encoding would be at the last step, just before authoring.

A lot depends on what you mean by "edit". Corel's software isn't highly recommended around here, but you can use whatever you want. TMPGEnc happens to be a good quality name, and their authoring programs are good buys. TMPGenc Mastering Works is an excellent encoding and editing product, but really it's principally designed as a quality encoder for DVD/BluRay/AVCHD. A timeline editor with many more "fancy effect" features (but with color controls and encoders that aren't quite as talented as TMPGEnc's) would be Sony's Movie Studio. At this point in the game, the "Pro" versions from Sony or Adobe would be overkill raised to new levels.

What anyone can advise next depends on how the AVIs are encoded and how you think they look.
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  #3  
12-05-2014, 08:07 PM
GaryG45 GaryG45 is offline
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Sanlyn,
Thank you for your quick response. I was aware that AVI was a container, and I'm sorry that I failed to mention it. I contacted the company, Timeless DVD, today, and they are using the DV codec. They said to expect about 13GB per hour of video.

By "edit" I mean tacking on titles and doing simple cuts and joins. I did experiment with adding fade to black transitions at the end of some clips, but they did nothing for me. I'm not planning to do any other editing at this time. Therefore it appears the AVIs will be made with lossy compression. What can I use to decode them to a lossless format?

Gary
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  #4  
12-05-2014, 09:35 PM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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Hmm...sorry to hear they charged money for lossy transfers that also cost 50% of the original chroma resolution. At least they didn't record it to low-bitrate, more lossy codecs. That done, if you are just appending titles and working simple cut and join processing (no overlays, no resizing, cropping, masking, denoising, transitions, or color correction) you may as well leave the videos as DV and use a decent smart-rendering editor like Sony Movie Studio. You can add extra music tracks without re-encoding the video portion. The Movie Studio Platinum edition adds DVD authoring to the features. Both versions are sold everywhere at discounts. Or use Movie Studio to cut as DV and re-encode to DVD, then use TMPGEnc Authoring Works for authoring. Either way works.

Keep in mind that DV is PC-only playback and can't be posted on most internet sites. It will have to be re-encoded to a standard format like DVD (universally compatible with everything), or SD BluRay or AVCHD (BluRay players only) for TV. DV audio is sampled at lossy 44KHz, so for all other standard formats the audio has to be resampled as well, to 48KHz. Standard-def DVD/BluRay/AVCHD are normally interlaced, so don't deinterlace your DV originals. For internet posting, several formats other than DV are acceptable (usually mp4/h264) but internet posts must be deinterlaced or the hosting site will royally screw things up by doing it themselves. I'd suggest you use something that uses or accepts yadif or better for deinterlacing (Avisynth or VirtualDub). Most NLE's don't do such a terrific job in that respect.

There are several ways to decode DV to lossless video with Lagarith lossless compression as YV12. Movie Studio can do it, or Avisynth. VirtualDub can also decode AVI, but it has a problem with the YV12 DV-AVI interlaced colorspace. If you ever decide to do some fancier editing, real cleanup and tweak things for DVD or standard definition Bluray, you can save the DV but work with lossless intermediate working files (which you don't have to keep) and then encode/author.

Last edited by sanlyn; 12-05-2014 at 09:47 PM.
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  #5  
12-06-2014, 05:40 AM
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lordsmurf lordsmurf is offline
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TimelessDVD is owned by Jen, a member of both this site and VH. She probably did a decent job, as she does use good hardware -- but we do disagree on the DV capture format. It's not good for transferring NTSC video, and you do lose color. As mentioned, it does throw away 50% of the color (chroma) data. That's how the files are only 13gb/hour, instead of 30gb+/hour.

Your original method was worse, so it should be a quality upgrade for you.

I'm curious why you didn't send your videos to us?

Do not edit in Womble. Womble is only good as a "scissors and tape" editor, not an "add effects/titles" type editor. It will butcher your video, and it is a terrible encoder. It's only good for cut/splice of MPEG files, not any kind of AVI or MP4.

What you want is Adobe Premiere Elements. And an older version is fine.
Find a box version from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.ht...reative=390957

You can find free editors, but they're all a nuisance. Some are old (decade+) technology, while others are just plain annoying to use and filled with bugs. Even cheap payware can be the same (terrible). Vegas and Premiere are best (on Windows), and the non-pro versions are probably more affordable (and easier to use) since you're not a professional. Of those two, Premiere Elements is easier to use.

Optionally, you can further improve/restore the VHS in VirtualDub, using the Huffyuv codec to save the new files, before feeding them to Premiere. This is what we do.

As stated, do not deinterlace the master, or for disc formats. Only deinterlace for "video sharing" sites (Youtube, etc), and even then do so with at least the Yadif method (VirtualDub default), or preferably QTGMC in Avisynth. All editors do a terrible job of deinterlacing, even $500+ pro software.

Welcome to the site.

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  #6  
12-06-2014, 06:08 AM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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Oops. lordsmurf is right, I forgot about Premiere Elements (too late at night for me, I guess!). Elements is probably a couple of bucks less in discounts, but easier to use, quicker to master, and you don't need the very latest edition. I would definitely heed his advice about deinterlacing. I don't know why, but even the big-name editors can't get it right. Yadif is a big step up (used by some media players), but QTGMC is ingenious at it.
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  #7  
12-06-2014, 05:43 PM
GaryG45 GaryG45 is offline
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Sanlyn and Lordsmurf,
My plan is to create DVDs from these tapes for the family. I have no plans to post these on the internet, but your information is very helpful.

I didn't come to you for the tape transfers because I was unaware of your services at the time. In early 2012 we decided to transfer our Video8 tapes to DVD. After doing some research I decided I didn't want to send the tapes to India for an automated process, and I found Timeless DVD; probably through a Google search. I sent them 4 tapes and was very pleased with the results. I couldn't compare the DVDs to the original tapes because my Sony camcorder was broken, but the results were better than expected.

I found a free ebook at PackT Publishing titled "Learning Virtual Dub" by Georgios Diamantopoulos. Because I have some time before I receive the AVI-DV files I'll probably take a look at it. Currently I plan to use Adobe Premiere Elements as suggested.

I really appreciate the input from both of you. It has been extremely helpful.

Gary
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  #8  
12-06-2014, 09:12 PM
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lordsmurf lordsmurf is offline
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Be wary of old information regarding VirtualDub. In the world of video, many things do not change. However, VirtualDub and Avisynth are two that continually advanced every year or two. I do my best to stay on top of new techniques. You'd better run some of that by us first. Better yet, attach the ebook (PDF?) to a post here. Let us see it.

I would hate for you to get bad or outdated advice.

Edit: Yuck! I just saw the book was 10+ years old. Pretty much everything in their will be useless info.

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  #9  
12-07-2014, 05:12 AM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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I often wonder why most of the old-time guides on many tech forums haven't been updated in several years -- I wonder, that is, until I suggest updating a guide or even starting one myself (yeah, like I know all there is, right? Sure). One problem is resources: many guides are designed by volunteers. The nature of forums like these is that the content is only partly a result of staff input (no one can know everything about everything, at least not any more), but largely the result of member contributions. The other factor is time: Tech info gets outdated almost as soon as it's published, if not before. By the time guides to the old VirtualDub 1.5 showed up, 1.8.x was already on the download site. Another problem is guide function or purpose: is the guide supposed to tell you absolutely everything, step by step, for every video type, every contingency or possible operation? Not even the AfterEffects user guide can do that, and it's nearly 700 pages of PDF -- and the PDF doesn't even mention some of the major AE plugins and added features.

VirtualDub isn't nearly as complicated as AE or even Premiere Elements. It's rather more specialized and not quite like anything most "consumers" are accustomed to. Most people use it to modify the primary video stream (although you can make some basic audio corrections such as fixing sampling rate errors) using either some of the 200 VDub filters available and/or viewing and saving the output of unlimited mods and corrections you can do with Avisynth.

VirtualDub doesn't really "install". The first time you run it, it unzips some files into its own folder (which you should call "VirtualDub") and makes a few registry entries telling Windows that it exists and where on your hard drive its plugins are located. If you don't want VDub anymore, there will be a file inside its folder called "auxsetup" that simply removes those registry entries and keeps everything else as-is. People still use version 1.9.11 (there's a newer one, but it needs some tweaks). If you click on "Help" you get a contents panel that has this alarming message: "Welcome to the new helpfile for VirtualDub 1.5+". Okay, Help has actually been massaged a bit since then. Help doesn't really tell how or why to do things to your video. What is tells you is where things are located in its interface (most of that info is in the "Dialogs" section of the Contents menu).

There's an old and simplified Doom9 guide to using VirtualDub. The cosmetics have changed since then, but the principles remain the same. 7.1 Postprocessing video using VirtualDub.
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  #10  
12-08-2014, 07:05 PM
GaryG45 GaryG45 is offline
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Thanks again to both of you for the information. I'll review the Virtual Dub information, and I need to decide which older version of Adobe Premiere to get. If I have further questions, I know where to ask.

Gary
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02-05-2015, 06:22 PM
GaryG45 GaryG45 is offline
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Sorry to reopen this thread, but while reviewing it yesterday to determine needed software, I noticed that I had skipped a step in the workflow, encoding. Reviewing the Encoding guide, I see that TMPGEen Plus 2.5 is recommended.

My new workflow would be:
Edit(cut,trim,add titles) the AVI-DV files with Adobe Premiere Elements and save as AVI-DV files
Encode with TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 to create MPEG2 files
Author with TMPGEnc Authoring Works 5
Burn DVD with IMGBURN

I guess an option would be to encode in Adobe Premiere Elements, but I don't believe that would be a good option. If I have made a mistake in my workflow, please correct/clarify. Thanks.

Gary
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  #12  
02-06-2015, 10:14 AM
sanlyn sanlyn is offline
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Looks OK. DV can be edited (simple cut and join) in just about any NLE including Premiere Elements, with DV smart-rendering only on the cut area. Keep in mind, however, that if you apply filters, cropping, overlays, or otherwise change the images themselves, your DV-AVI will be lossy re-encoded in its entirety.

TMPGenc Plus 2.5 can accept DV-AVI as input. Output should be set for interlaced video in its demuxed form -- that is, output an m2v video and an uncompresed .wav file for the audio. In the front panel dialog this is shown as "ES (video+_audio". Plus 2.5 doesn't output Dolby AC3. (Then why do people still use it? Because it's still a darn good encoder, superior to Premiere Elements, at a ridiculously low price !).

The m2v and .wav output can be joined and the audio resampled to Dolby AC3 in TMPGenc Authoring Works. Assuming you made a valid m2v for MPEG, the video part won't be re-encoded.
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