Converting an LD to a DVD

[prof_frink]

Here's a question for you audio/video experts out there... explain to me if this will work.

I want to convert some of my laserdiscs to DVDs, so what I was thinking of doing is this:

hook my LD player up to my camcorder via the input on my camcorder

Hook the camcorder up to my PC via the firewire cable and do a livecapture, so I'm not taping the movies onto the camcorder, just using it as a pass through

I would then capture it as an mpg (mpg1 I assume?)

And then convert to a DVD at a later time...

Does this make sense? I haven't tried yet, but I was thinking of rigging this up tonight... Keep in mind, I really don't want to spend money on capture cards and other such devices, and I really don't see what I'm losing quality wise by doing it this way...

Any comments, suggestions?

[willy]

As long as your DV supports the PassThrough feature, I think it will work. One thing tho .... You may want to record the incoming video clip in the 'raw' DV format (25Mb/s ?) and you can convert that file(s) into a DVD. You may also want to add a few chapters into the movies ...

Make sure you have PLENTY of free diskspace. Just to give you an idea .... 1 hour of DV takes up ~ 12GB.

[prof_frink]

Ok - thanks - sounds about right. I'm actually clearing up lots of space right now in preperation...

Question though - if I save it as raw DV, don't I have to convert it anyway to mpg to convert it to a DVD? What's the advantage to saving it in dv format?

[willy]

Ok - thanks - sounds about right. I'm actually clearing up lots of space right now in preperation...

Question though - if I save it as raw DV, don't I have to convert it anyway to mpg to convert it to a DVD? What's the advantage to saving it in dv format?
Maybe I don't know how to do it ... I don't think you can capture directly into .VOB files with menu and stuff ....

BTW, DVD should be in MPEG-2.

[elephant]

Also, there will be a COPY RIGHT protection you have to by-pass. Since I'm assuming your LD are bought from stores and you didn't make them out of home movies right?

Check out the internet help sites, TONS of ppl have done what you are about to do.

www.dvdhelp.com


Beware, 30 min of capture is like 1 gigabyte or more.

I have the Pinnacle USB capture device and I've been converting clips of VHS tapes to VCD. Its not easy. Things always go wrong. Like sound/video out of sync, something freezes during burning process, etc....

[Haz]

You may want to check out Video Help (http://www.videohelp.com/). There are guides for just about everything about converting video.

[prof_frink]

So - if anyone is curious - I gave this a try last night, and it didn't work.

Apparently, my camcorder doesn't have the 'passthrough' feature (canon ZR25) so I can't put an input into the camera and then output it through the firewire cable. There's a feature, that at the time when I bought the camera, I never thought to look for.

So I tired recording it onto a DV tape, and then send it to the PC via firewire from the DV tape, and it just won't transfer, it keeps stuttering and losing frames - I guess my PC just isn't fast enough

[willy]

So I tired recording it onto a DV tape, and then send it to the PC via firewire from the DV tape, and it just won't transfer, it keeps stuttering and losing frames - I guess my PC just isn't fast enough
Just curious ... What kind of system do you have (CPU, RAM, HD) ?

[prof_frink]

Just curious ... What kind of system do you have (CPU, RAM, HD) ?

It's an Althlon 1700 (or 1600 - I can never remember - either way, it's 1 ghz) on an ECS k75sa board, 384 mb SD ram, 80 gb hd (I have about 40 gb free right now).

I know it's not up to date, but it does everything I want it to do, except video editing I guess...

[willy]

Hmmm ... I think a friend of mine has a 1900+/640MB/80GB and it works on his machine ...

Have you checked the DMA setting for your HD(s) ?

[prof_frink]

Hmmm ... I think a friend of mine has a 1900+/640MB/80GB and it works on his machine ...

Have you checked the DMA setting for your HD(s) ?

I figured I needed more RAM...

What should the DMA settings be?

[willy]

I figured I needed more RAM...

What should the DMA settings be?
You may want to turn off/shutdown all the non-essential stuff to free up some resources.

Should be "DMA if possible" (hopefully not "PIO only").

[prof_frink]

You may want to turn off/shutdown all the non-essential stuff to free up some resources.

Should be "DMA if possible" (hopefully not "PIO only").

Thanks - I'll check that out tonight...

I do remember that my burner had an issue with DMA on, but that may have been my old PC...

Anyway - thanks for the tip, I'll try again and see what happens...

[monomono]

Don't capture it to MPEG1, quality will be crap. Better to find some software that can do direct to DVD capture, your machine should be able to handle it. Roxio Creator 7 has this feature.
Otherwise capture to an MPEG2 file for DVD (720x480) and burn it later.

[deep]

If I owned a laserdisc (which makes this one of them there hy-po-thetical posts) and wanted the DVD, I would feel no compunction about downloading it. Go ahead, call the cops.

[Pete Jones]

(beware: long post ahead)

Since I've just been doing this myself, I thought I'd chime in.

First off, a couple of points on laserdisc video.

1. Laserdiscs consist of _composite_ analog video.
(that means, it won't be quite as sharp as what we're use to with a DVD and you will see some noise in shadow areas and color bleeding -- even with a S connection)

2. Laserdiscs, by design, aren't copy protected. Because of the way the video is put on the disc, macrovision really doesn't work and was never adopted on laserdiscs.

I have an old Sony Digital-8 camcorder that "accidentally" has pass-through. I say accidentally because at the time, people were snapping these cheap (at the time) camcorders as as video digitizers instead of paying twice the price for a Sony Firewire digitizer. Sony caught on to this and killed the feature in all future models. So my point is, don't be surprised that you don't have pass-through.

So lets start by assuming that you'll be using your camcorder to record to tape and transfer to the computer. Assuming your hard drive is clean and you're not running a bunch of other processors, your computer should be sufficient for the capture. (my first capture box was a Duron 1.3 with 256mb memory, 80 gig hard drive and an ECS k75sa mb -- actually slower than yours) Odds are, you'll just neeed to kill off some processes and turn off the live preview mode on your software.

Once you've captured the video, if you're lucky you won't have any audio/video synch issues. This is a major problem with VHS transfer and could still happen with LD since you're still dealing with an analog signal and if your disc isn't perfectly clean, you're bound to get some missing frames. It may or may not be an issue.

Then you'll need to render your video to Mpeg2. This will take a while. Count on taking at least 8 hours of processing time per hour of finished video if you want decent 2-pass output.

Then you'll need to use some authoring software to actually create the DVD files. This is where you'll possibly add chapters and maybe even title screens. You can get pretty involved with this, especially if your source has lots of extra features.

And finally, you'll burn to DVD.

The software I use for this is Sony Vegas 6.0. It's not cheap and might be overkill but since I already use it for DV editing, it's handy.

Now, I'm assuming your going to DVD, but if you're going the VCD or DIVX route, the process will be much the same. (except for the DVD authoring)

An easier way to do the capture is to go out and get a Hauppauge card. They're inexpensive and will do a pretty decent job and go straight to Mpeg2.

Any way you slice it, this isn't a "quick and dirty" process. However, there are some LDs out there that I doubt you'll ever see on DVD and LDs are actually quite fragile. (they scratch quite easily and they are much more susceptable to bit rot even though some have been around now for 20 years)

Hope this helps,
--Pete