How do I eliminate overscan in CCE?

[mikesown]

I am currently converting my first(of many) VHS tapes to DVD! I have encountered a slight problem, however. I captured the tape via an ATI Radeon 9700 All-In-Wonder capture card(composite in) with VirtualDub, recording at 640x480 resolution into PICVideo's MJPEG codec(quality level 18), and I'm left with a ~6gb file. The file looks reasonably good with one major flaw(other than interlaced video, which I plan to leave): The video has overscan in it. That is, the bottom few lines of the screen are blurry and distracting. Now, I want to use CCE to encode the video into MPEG-2 format(as I've heard it's the best MPEG-2 encoder). I'm left with the problem of how to crop out the overscan. My questions are:

1. How can I crop out the overscan blurriness on the bottom of the screen? Can I do it using CCE?

2. What resolution should the final DVD be at(considering I captured at 640x480, and the picture is 4:3, and the fact that I want to crop out the overscan)? Obviously, I want to keep the DVD in a 4:3 ratio, but what resolution, in the DVD spec, should I keep this at?

I'm really clueless at this stage, and would appreciate any advise!

[FlimsyFeet]

A blurry few lines at the bottom is not overscan, I think the correct term is VHS head switching noise.

If played back on a conventional TV, this noise is hidden by "overscan" - which is the portion of the picture that lies outside the viewing area.

I normally capture at 720 wide so there's no need to resize. I suggest you learn to use AviSynth, it would be the ideal way to crop out the few lines and resize. Alternatively you could use VirtualDub and frameserve to CCE, that's the way I used to do it before I learned AviSynth.

[communist]

As FlimsyFeet said you wont see that noise on a regular TV anyway but if you dont like it just crop and replace it with pure black etc with Avisynth.
Cropping and resizing will change aspect ratio. If you just crop you will push another part of the frame into the overscan region.

[2Bdecided]

If they bother you, set those lines to black. Maybe via crop and addborders.

Don't crop overall though - the end result still needs 480 lines! Otherwise you'll be doing pointless resizing, and wreck the interlacing.

Cheers,
David.

[mikesown]

I used AVISynth(combined with a CCE encode) to crop out the bottom 6 lines or so(using letterbox). This worked fine, and produces a decent(but not great, probably because I did a 2.5mbit CBR 1 pass encode) picture. However, I end up with a huge problem: the picture is choppy when watching it on my DVD player(which is hooked up via s-video to my CRT 27" TV). I kept the video in interlaced format... I have to ask one question: I capture at 29.97 frames/second. Do I need to capture at double that to get all the interlaced frames? I don't really want to remove the interlacing, since the DVD will primarily be watched on TVs. What could be causing the choppiness? The video looks (fairly) decent in VLC with the blend interlace mode on.

Also, on another note, is the best option for capturing using an MJPEG codec(keep in mind I have a tiny 80gb hard drive which could never hold 90 minutes of lossless footage)? Also, what bitrate is ideal for encoding VHS?

[2Bdecided]

If, on movement, it seems to stutter backwards and forwards very rapidly, then you have swapped the fields, or set the wrong field order.

If you encoded bottom field first, try top field first.

Most likely is that your crop moved the lines from one field (1,3,5,7,9...) on to the other (2,4,6,8...). Hence my advice above!

Cheers,
David.

[Mug Funky]

CCE has blanking options in it. the simplest solution is to use those, though working with VHS you'll probably want to throw some avisynth wizardry at it anyway, and while you're there you can blank the video as well (best keep to mod 8 or mod 16 pixel cropping if you're going to mpeg-2 - it's more efficient).