[Mike Kujbida]

Watch any well-edited movie and count the number of straight cuts to cross-fades. It will be about 100-1.

How many folks here do feature length movies? My guess is not too many.
The bulk of my personal work is slide shows and I guarantee you that one of these done as cuts-only would be sent back to me to be re-edited 🙂

[Mike Kujbida]

Put the little girl on track 1 and the little boy on track 2.
Now lower the opacity of track 1 as desired.
If you’re not sure how, move the cursor to the top of the event frame. You’ll see the pointer change to a finger and say “Opacity is 100%”. Click and drag the finger down as required.

[Mike Kujbida]

A real stab in the dark here but is Stretch to fill frame (Event Pan/Crop – Source) set to No?

[Mike Kujbida]

That’s correct (audio crossfade, that is).

[Mike Kujbida]

Actually, Half-D1 for NTSC is 352×480…

Thanks for the correction George!!
Obviously a minor (??) brain malfunction on my part.

[Mike Kujbida]

Dave, half D-1 is 352 x 240 and is a valid DVD (and DVD Architect) image resolution.
Since the Canopus doesn’t allow it during capture, you’d have to do this size conversion (preferably to DV-AVI) after you’ve captured the original footage. Select your usual DVDA template and then customize it to alter the size.

Here’s the link to the bitrate calculator I use. Be advised that the link is to a zipped file, not a web site.

[Mike Kujbida]

If you were starting with much higher quality source material, I’d say go ahead but with VHS (in my opinion), the quality will suck.

My bitrate calc says a CBR of 3700 or a VBR of 6600, 3700, 2200.

Try doing a short (5 min.) clip with these settings and see what you think. You may find it acceptable.

If you don’t have a dual layer burner, you could try splitting it over 2 discs to maximize quality.
This way I get a CBR of 7700 or a VBR of 8000, 7700, 3800.

Either way, do a 2-pass encode to help clean things up.

[Mike Kujbida]

Sorry Marlen but you can’t. Because the Extras folder is exactly that (an extra), it can’t be navigated to as a menu item.

[Mike Kujbida]

Sound Forge has a tool called “Clipped Peak Restoration” (or something along those lines) that may be able to help you.

[Mike Kujbida]

I’ve done this numerous times.
Create a new folder called Extras and put anything you want into it (PDFs, images, Powerpoint presentations, etc.).
After I’ve prepared my DVD files in DVDA, I add this Extras folder to the master folder that contains the AUDIO_TS & VIDEO_TS folders. I then use RecordNow to burn it all as a data DVD.
Home DVD players ignore the ectra folder while computer users simply browse to it.