VHS to DVD Transfer

[Don Greening]

[James Vancouver] “Manual “capture now” is working but there seems to be fuzz at the top and bottom of the screen, not unlike poor tracking.”

Are you seeing this “fuzz” when viewing on a television monitor or is it only visible within FCP in either the viewer or canvas windows? There should be no generational loss when digitizing from your VHS analogue source i.e. it won’t look any better than the source but it won’t be any worse, either. Make sure you’re viewing your footage using the high quality video setting within FCP. It’s a preference. To view the final video quality you must use a TV monitor connected to your VTR deck and not judge the quality by what you see on your computer display. Remember that FCP will show an underscanned image in the viewer/canvas windows, so the extreme edges will not be seen on final output. Activate FCP’s “title and action safe” boxes in either the viewer or canvas windows and you’ll see what will and will not be included in final output.

If you’re exporting to Compressor directly from FCP, that method is generally considered to be the most unreliable way of encoding prior to creating your DVD. The fact that you’ve done it this way in the past doesn’t mean that you’ll continue to have good luck with this particular workflow.

May I recommend a more reliable way: export your QT movie from FCP as self-contained, video only. Export your audio separately using the ‘export audio to .aif’ command. Open the Compressor app. and use any of the presets available, just like you did when exporting from within FCP. Convert your .aif audio to AC3 audio using A.Pack and then you can bring all of these elements into DVDSP, if that’s the DVD authoring program you intend to use. I’m assuming you have the first version of Compressor. If you use Compressor 2 then you can convert your .aif audio from within the new version.

Another advantage of this method is that you can still use FCP while Compressor works in the background. Using AC3 file format audio will also prove to be more DVD player ‘friendly’, as the high bit rates of .aif audio tend to make some players choke, not to mention that the smaller file size of AC3 audio leaves you more room on the DVD for video content. Since you haven’t stated which version of FCP or Compressor you’re uing I’m trying to cover all the bases, nor have you said what program you’re going to use for your DVD authoring.

As always, it’s up to you whether or not you choose to export your QT movie as self-contained or as a reference movie. Hard drive space limitations will be your guide in that respect.

I’ve only had one instance where the dialogue: “cannot connect to background process” came up. All I did was trash all the exported FCP files I used , created new ones and the problem went away. Since I’ve never used Compressor within FCP I don’t know if the issue is the same as when Compressor is used as a stand-alone app. This does, however, seem to be an occasional problem and there are many forum threads on the subject. Just do a search here at Creative Cow.

Here’s hoping that all these recommendations are making sense for you.

– Don

[James Vancouver]

Don – let me start by saying thanks for the reply. Very helpful.

To answer your questions…I have not been viewing the footage on a monitor other then the FCP viewer. So I will try this and see the difference. I thought it was weird that I would see this poor quality, and fuzz at the bottom of the screen. In fact, the quality is great in the viewer, but when i look at it full frame it’s terrible. So I’m thinking it’s actually blowing it up, not just making it full frame. Does that make sense? Anyway, I’ll try the monitor – thanks!

As for the exporting… This is where you lost me a little…my in-experience I’m afraid. To get some things clear first, I am using FCP-HD 4.5 and Compressor ver 1.2.1. I was planning on picking up iLife which includes iDVD, and Garage Band among other things, which i need. I am also not familiar with DVDSP – perhaps I should buy this instead…? Unfortunately, I don’t know what AC3 and A-Pack are thanks to my novice-ness. I have managed to export through Quicktime, but the files are so large I wouldn’t get much on a DVD, hence my attempts at using Compressor. If your suggestion to export video and audio separately will buy me DVD space, then I’m willing to give it a shot. Also, I’m finding that using Quicktime is taking hours for the processing…which I’m actually not too worried about. I don’t mind the waiting or the HD space, more concerned about the final product and size of it. Was hoping to burn multiple clips onto single DVD’s. Perhaps I’m not being realistic to begin with.

I haven’t yet had a chance to try your suggestions, and will require some more reading of the “Help” function. Thanks again for your suggestions, if you have anything more to add I would be most grateful.

James

PS – You’re my first forum replier! I love this thing – it’s amazing….

[Don Greening]

James,

The “fuzz” you’re seeing will be the edges of the VHS tape. This won’t be seen if you monitor your video with a television hooked up to your deck. This will let you see exactly what the final frame will look like once you’ve burned to a DVD. You mentioned that your video looks fine in FCP’s viewer window but looks pixelated/terrible when viewed “full frame”. Keep in mind that NTSC 4:3 video has a resolution of 720X480 pixels. If you use Quicktime Player to view your video clips make sure you choose to watch at “actual size” which is available in the Quicktime Player’s view menu. Anything larger will cause your clip to become pixelated because you’re blowing it up larger than it was recorded at. Remember that most computer dispays have a resolution of much more than 720X480, so if your video clip is taking up the whole screen it will indeed look terrible. For example, my main Apple display has a maximum resolution of 1920X1200 pixels, so if I expanded a piece of video to fill as much of the screen as possible it would look awful. Televisions have a much lower pixel resolution than a computer display. Their pixels are larger, so you can see a bigger overall picture but the resolution will still be 720×480. Does this make sense?

If you’re planning to use iDVD then you don’t need to use Compressor at all. Just export a Quicktime movie (with audio) out of Final Cut Pro using the same preset as your timline, which is DV NTSC 48Khz. All you have to do then is import that movie into iDVD and it will encode the file for a DVD automatically. Remember too, that a single layer DVD can only hold 4.7 Gbytes of video and audio, so it has to compress your DV movie into a much smaller size, which will then become an MPEG2 file.

A.Pack is an audio compression program that shipped with earlier versions of DVD Studio Pro. If you don’t have DVDSP then you won’t have A.Pack. DVDSP will give you much more control over your final DVD than iMovie does. iMovie is for people that don’t want to know about MPEG2 compression, etc. but just want to create simple DVD’s for viewing home movies and pictures within a simple slide show. The single biggest reason for going to the next level with DVD Studio Pro is the ability to control all aspects of DVD authoring, including compressing the audio so there’s more room for video. Usually, the audio takes up a huge portion of the DVD space, so compressing it will allow you to use a higher bitrate for the video file which translates to better viewing quality.

You can also transfer your native DV files to a data DVD without compressing, but you won’t be able to play them in any DVD player. The idea here is just for storage/archive purposes. Native DV files consume 1 Gbyte of space for every 5 minutes of video, so this will give you an idea of the file size difference between native DV and an MPEG2 DVD file that you can watch with a consumer DVD player. With a program like DVD Studio Pro you can compress up to 2 hours of audio and video onto a single layer DVD with acceptable quality. iMovie will allow you the same 2 hours, but the quality will be lower.

Hopefully this has all made sense to you.

– Don

[James Vancouver]

Don – You have been extrememly helpful – THANK YOU! It all totally makes sense to me as you’ve explained it.

Regards,
James
Vancouver

[Don Greening]

Glad I was able to help a little. Good luck.

– Don