capturing from laserdisc, have I got this right?

[lancer]

Right, I am about to embark on the usual and predictable, I wanna capture star wars from Laserdisc to DVD route like many befor me. I've hovered on the board for the last few weeks and now I have my questions ready.

I haven't bought it yet but I will have.

Pioneer 515 player outputting a pure NTSC signal. this will connect to my PC's s-video in via a SCART to s-video lead.

sound is inputted from the analogue out from the player to the analogue in on my soundblaster 5.1 live! platinum.

My PC is PIII 733, 512mb and a 80gb drive exclusively for capturing. I will not be using a capture board. the only one I have access to is a Pinnacle studio deluxe and it's pissing me off cos it only captures by DV and the controls are shit.

I'm gonna use either virutal VCR or premier 6 or virtual dub to capture the video using the huffyuv lossless codec.

I am then going to use tmpgenc to encode it into dvd mpeg2

and then use either spruce or maestro to author.

have I got the steps right?

I have read on some threads people talking about deinterlacing when capturing and encoding etc. why? if it captured as ntsc, encoded as ntsc and burned as ntsc, do I need to de-interlace? I can't see why but if someone could explain great.

second, where do avisynth scripts come into things? I've been reading the threads for a while and I can't see where this program comes into the scheme of things.

third, is it possible to capture, and then when encoding stretch it into pseudo anamorphic (ie non anamorphic capture, stretched so it plays back anamorphic) that way, although i currently have a 4:3 telly, when I move up to a widescreen one, I can preserve picture quality as much as possible.

would 80GB be enough to capture and then encode? by my reckoning using huffyuv which does 12mb/s that's 12288k per second = 88473.6GB for a 2 hour film. what about mjpeg, would I be better off using that codec, from what I can glean that compresses better than huffyuv while retaining quality.

if anyone can throw any comments on this, it would be great, or point me to any threads I've missed, even better.

[kempodragon]

I can answer a couple of questions. 80 gigs should be enough for Huffyuv. I have 120 gigs and Huffyuv lets me record about 4 1/2 - 5 hrs. Make sure that you can capture 720x480, 29.97 fps, in YUV colorspace. Audio must be captured at 48 Khz for DVD compliance. Avisynth is needed for the necessary IVTC, since Virtual Dub can't operate in YUV colorspace. Read the guides on IVTC and why it is used in encoding. Check out the Avisynth FAQ for details about how it is used. It is possible to stretch the picture, but I wouldn't advise it. Laserdisc used pan-and-scan for movies, IIRC (you know you're getting old when you can remember when laserdisc were cutting edge). I don't know if they ever used widescreen. If you stretch the picture, everything will be distorted. Anyone else got some tips or links to threads?

[lancer]

right, I came across a thread about avisynth so I know where that comes in. cool.

now interlacing. I think I am starting to see it but check me.

NTSC is 29.97 fps. film is 24fps and how it was originally shown in the cinema. Laserdisc footage is encoded interlaced which I follow because this is how it is shown on TV.

I just read a guide so I think I am nearly there.

you capture the interlace NTSC and IVTC it using a synth script to make it 24fps film standard capturing the audio at 48khz stereo. this gives you a 24fps non interlaced progressive source.

how come then when I TMPGEnc the 24fps avi I have to pick either NTSC or PAL? that means it's going to be changed back into something else right? so why bother IVTC in the first place. is this to give us choice of what we encode. either PAL or NTSC at our discretion.

I dont' want 4% speedup so I am sticking at making the final product NTSC. now TMPGenc doesn't have a TC tag in advanced settings. do I select 3:2 pulldown to make it 30 fps. but then that isn't NTSC 29.97. does the very fact I select NTSC at the beginning mean, it's going to do that for me and make the 24fps source into 29.97 ntsc?

sorry for lengthy post but I feel I am close to getting this and it is vitally important I do so to make this work.

oh BTW, the definitive box set of Star Wars, the original cut is in Widescreen, not pan and scan.

someone on another thread said it wasn't worth pseudo anamorphicing laserdiscs but surely it would be a good idea to make it look reasonable on a widescreen TV?

[markrb]

I own about 400 laserdiscs and except for the TV shows over 90% of them are letterbox. None are anamorphic, but of those 90% all are 16:9 video encoded as 4:3 with the black bars as part of the encoding.

Mark

[Jeff D]

lancer, I sent you a PM about this. I'm doing the same thing right now, how did your results look?

I'm also looking to to an anamporphic resize, crop the image to 720x276 and resize that to 720x368 add the borders on and volia, an anamporphic image! =) Too bad the resizers screw up a lot on scenes like where leia's ship is moving into the cargo bay of the empire's ship. The grating in the top of the cargo bay is all messed up on a resize. I might just leave the image as captured and let my Panasonic RP-91 do the 4:3 letterbox to 16:9 scaling.