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VHS to Sony Vegas – Torn on which NLE to use…
Hey all, was looking at a few options as far as programs. My Ion Video2PC converter which connects to a VCR player and the USB into the computer is what I am currently using. It exports at MPEG-2. I tried importing it to Resolve but it doesn’t show up and I heard that Sony Vegas and Pinnacle 19 support it. I’ve not tried either buy they both are around $99.00 for a download onto the computer. I am looking for a reliable SD based editing system for PC (or iMac, but with PC I have a RAID 10 Array which I’d like to use to store the VHS footage on). I am looking for a solid software that exports straight to DVD since I’ll be importing and then exporting a final product. My concern is going to be the exporting files and the compression. Obviously 720×480 isn’t great quality but I would like to retain the same quality when exporting if at all possible. I see that Pinnacle offers H.264 and Vegas doesn’t. I don’t know much about other programs so perhaps people can give their opinions on these two programs and what is the earliest version I can get or a version where I don’t need 4K support and all this added on stuff.
I just need the ability to import MPEG-2 files, export to DVD and possibly Bluray and all I need is a SD timeline. And it must be able to handle a 90 minute VHS feature, with maybe 10 hours of shot unedited footage (worse case scenario). My concern is exporting the final product and having it looked all weird as I’ve seen videos that are shot on VHS on YouTube that have lines in the visual (not VHS retro looking lines, but exporting or importing lines that make the image look bad)
Not interested in prescription based NLE software. I’d like to buy it one time and get started.
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1 Reply
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I’d like to buy it one time and get started.
I’d suggest you first download some trial versions and see what works best for you. You want to make sure that the software will “smart render” your MPEG-2 footage, i.e. render “only” the parts that are changed–not the entire file. VHS is very poor quality to start with. Moreover, your capture device is pretty low-end judging from its cost. Re-rendering will make it look worse. Suggest you take a look at products from Womble (Womble MPEG-VCR and Womble EasyDVD), Videoredo, and TMPGEnc. They all have free trials. You can try Vegas, but it’s more of a full editor not really designed for VHS to DVD conversions. One final point–there is really no need for export to Blu-ray since it will not improve the quality of the VHS, unless all you want to do is put a lot of footage on one disc. Most newer DVD players will do up-scaling automatically. One of the easiest ways (and often the best quality because of hardware encoding) is to use a DVD recorder. Once the DVD is recorded from your VHS player, it can then be imported for final authoring if you want to add chapters, menus, etc. Again, download some trial versions and see what works best for you.
wwaag
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