Workflow after lossless capture? (VHS to DVD)
 

I know many of you have read this same opening a million times, but I'm a beginner when it comes to video capturing, editing, etc. The posts and community on here have really helped me get some of the building blocks to get started and give it a try, so thanks for that!

My hardware is mostly a collection of things I've obtained over the years and am trying to put them together to convert some old family VHS tapes onto DVDs with some decent quality. Below is kind of what I've done so far, but I feel like I may not be doing things as efficiently as I should be. I'll put a summary of where I'm at below and where I'd like to get:

I have a Zenith 3850R-Z290H VCR and a AVerMedia EZMaker 7 capture card. I've used VirtualDub to capture using Lagarith lossless compression. I was having trouble with getting Huffyuv to show up as an option in VirtualDub, so I went with Lagarith. I followed some general guides on the forums for the size and capture settings. It creates about a 65GB AVI for a 2 hour VHS video, which I think is about right, and the capture looked/sounded good to me.

After that I did some minor video edits within VirtualDub and then saved (File>save as AVI) the new edited video which was almost 100GB. It seemed like at this point I was going about it wrong. I also saved a WAV of the audio from virtualdub, imported that into Audacity, where I did some audio effects (noise reduction) to help reduce some of the buzz sound the video had, and then saved a "fixed" audio WAV out of Audacity. I was going to then import the edited AVI file and the "fixed" audio into a program to compress it down to fit on a DVD.

I was playing with some programs I've seen on other posts (HandBrake, Avidemux) but I think Windows 10 was giving me trouble with getting the AVI files to open in them. I also have Vegas Pro 14, but was so overwhelmed with all the "render as" options it has, and didn't know what to pick to get it in a format for DVD.

Any general advice on moving things along to getting my captures "DVD Ready" as well as pointing out where I'm going about things the wrong way would be appreciated!

If your Avi files increase dramatically in size wen you save them, you're not saving with the same colorspace and Lagarith compression that you started with. By default VirtualDub saves as uncompressed RGB24. Set the output colorspace using "Video.." -> "color depth..." (for DVD, that would be YV12). Set the compression using "Video.." -> "compression..." and configure Lagarith for YV12.

DVD is encoded using MPEG2, which your editor should be able to accomplish. A rule of thumb for decent quality is to limit the encode to 90 minutes on a single DVD disc. The type of encode to set is 2-pass variable bit rate (VBR) at about 6200 mbps with a max of 8500 mbps. Good audio would be Dolby digital AC3 sampled at level 256 (sample frequency is 48k). DVD is interlaced 720x480/29.972 fps (NTSC) or 720x576/25 fps (PAL), display aspect ratio from VHS source is 4:3. You need an authoring program to author and burn the MPEG encode to disc.

If you can't read Corel's user manual, you'll be at a severe disadvantage with any video editor. Free editors, encoders and authoring programs have fewer features and are more difficult to learn. You simply have to be patient and learn to master those boring user guides.

Busted! I didn't change the default settings... Thanks for pointing that out and thanks for the settings info.

The edit I had used was a deinterlace (Yadif) filter to try and get rid of the "combing" my capture had. After reading some other posts, it sounds like leaving the video interlaced might make more sense if I was intending to get these onto a DVD where the TV/Player would handle the deinterlacing? Or am I way off base with that thought?

Related to that, if I was intending to get any VHS capture onto YouTube, would it make sense to deinterlace the capture with VirtualDub or some other software prior to uploading to YouTube?

Thank you for all this info!

I will work through the manual along with the other information you've given me here and what I've found elsewhere to work through it. Thanks again for the reply!

Editors always show combing. Telecine, which uses a form of interlace, also displays combing in groups of a few frames at a time. Why do editors show combing? Because they don't deinterlace, unless you have an editor that lets you tell it to do so for display. Make sense?

TVs, media players, external players, set top boxes, etc. -- somewhere along the line at least one of them will deinterlace or inverse telecine. You probably don't realize it but almost everything on HDTV is either interlaced or telecined. How much time do you invest in deinterlacing your TV shows and retail DVDs?

Software deinterlacing in post-processing is a destructive process and always involves loss through re-encoding. Therefore, deinterlacing is prescribed only when necessary or when required for web posting. There are cases of excessive combing and aliasing/sawtooth edge effects, indicating that the video's processing and encoding are sloppy. Sometimes this means you have to deinterlace, use filters designed to help smooth things out, and re-interlace.

Deinterlacing with VirtualDub is inferior to QTGMC, which is the best deinterlacer around and can be better than many TVs and external players. YouTube's processing is cheap and dirty and ugly, so you want to submit the cleanest deinterlace and cleanup work that you can manage. For web posting you will also have to resize to square-pixel frame sizes. Web players can't handle anamorphic frame formats. Always deinterlace before resizing. Check websites for the frame sizes they prefer.