Like most people on this forum, I'm transferring old VHS tapes to DVD. I'm using
VirtualDub, a Diamond VC500 capture device, and a Magnavox mono HQ VCR, model number illegible, salvaged from GoodWill. I'm satisfied with the quality of the capture (it's actually better than the TV playback from a newer Panasonic VCR I have attached directly to our HDTV) and have worked out good settings for the few filters I want to use (mostly noise reduction, with a bit of sharpening to compensate for sharpness lost in NR). However, two issues have come up that I can't find answers for, either here or anywhere else I've searched online:
(1) I'm trying to split a one-hour tape into several shorter segments in order to create chapters on a DVD, and I would rather not drop any frames in the process, so that playing through the split on the DVD will not be noticeable (and sound in the second segment won't slip out of sync). I understand that
VirtualDub's selections are end-point exclusive. I'm guessing this means that if I want, say, two chapters, one containing frames 0-10000 and the other containing frames 10001-20000, I should set the first selection to 0-10001 and the second to 10000-20001. Is this correct, or will it cause a one-frame overlap? As a side issue, does anyone know of free (or cheap) DVD authoring software that will allow chapter or scene cues to be set
where the user chooses instead of where the software chooses without having to split the video at those points before handing it off to the authoring program?
(2) To mask out the overscan noise at the bottom of the capture, I've tried using (a) the fill filter, (b) the resize filter with cropping, and (c) both together. All three methods leave one nice bright line of overscan at the very bottom of the screen,
beneath the black mask created to block it out, when played back through a computer media player such as WMP or KMP. Should I be worried about this for playback through a DVD player attached to an LCD TV? If so, does anyone know of a way to get rid of it?