-
VHS to avi to BluRay
I want to edit old VHS tapes (PAL) to BluRay discs on Premier Pro CS6. First, using a VCR and a camcorder I made 20 minute avi files. I used to edit to DVD’s and they looked reasonably good. But now when I play them on a HD TV they look bad. Experimentally, I expanded some avi’s to 1920×1080 in PPro, encoded to BluRay and burned a BD. It looks much better. So I decided to do that with all my tapes. My question is: What Sequence Preset to set up for best quality as I start a new Project? AVCHD 1080i25? HDV 1080i25? Other?
Second: Should I expand all clips in the timeline and then start editing or edit all, nest and then expand? Or something else? Reading other posts on this forum I saw other recommendations like burn as is (that is 720×560) and let the BluRay player expand but I noticed that different TV’s and Players expand differently and sometimes the picture is squeezed horizontally, sometimes it’s expanded horizontally…
-
4 Replies
-
[Vasco daNeva] “But now when I play them on a HD TV they look bad.”
VHS tapes are pretty much worse than DVD’s. You are just throwing away time and money if you’re making blurays out of them when DVD’s are pretty much the best, similarly specced format for standard definition stuff.
-
Save your time and effort – make the best possible DVD that you are able to, and use a DVD or Blu-ray player that upconverts and outputs via HDMI to your display. It will not look any better by using software HD conversion and Blu-ray discs.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
If your source footage is VHS grade level content, why would you stretch it out 6 times to put in 1080P medium bluray discs? I do hundreds of tape to disc conversion projects monthly in my business and its best to convert them to SD M2V/WAV files and put them onto DVDs. The media is less expensive not to mention your investment in processing time on the upconversion and you don’t have to deal with the additional resources on your system resulting from the unnecessary expansion of data to make the detail something that it never had anyway. Other than when a client requests to integrate legacy content on a limited basis, for selected highlights that were edited down, I would recommend avoiding going down that path since this is a case when the HD doesn’t give you anything. Let your SD stay where its best viewed… in SD. That’s my advice.
———
Professional videography since 1996
https://www.tetonvideo.com -
Thank you, one and all. You are absolutely right, of course, regarding waste of space, time, effort, money… But I made a DVD and a BD (expanded within PPro, without Instant HD etc.) of an identical project and the BD looked considerably better on 3 different BD players and 2 different HD TV’s. The DVD encoding was the best possible while for BD I used Constant bitrate 18 (but again that shouldn’t matter because anything is better than the VHS material, as you pointed out). So please humor me and tell me what Sequence Preset to set up as I start a new Project?
Thanks again.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up