Saving my LDs as Divx - what software do I need?

[AnitaPeterson]

Hi,

Newbie here :)

I have recorded my original Blade Runner (118 minutes) Laserdisc on a digital tape, and now I'll be downloading it into the computer via FireWire.

I guess I'll record it as MPEG2, high quality: 720x480, 29.97 fps, 44.1 KHz audio. I'm using Ulead VideoStudio, by the way.

How do I convert the resulting file into Divx? All the guides I've checked on Doom9 and Divx.com start with the presupposition that I'm ripping DVDs, so that really doesn't help me much. There will be two resulting files, since the LD was recorded on two tapes, so I will also need to join them (which I think I can do in Ulead, but it would be helpful if you give me other suggestions).

By the way, I'm looking into fitting the movie onto ONE disc, using 3.11 codec, not the 4.12, since a) I don't have the 4.12 (and I don't want to install it, since I'm afraid it will mess up my 3.11) and b) I also hear it's got some quirks.

I have plenty of free space on the HD (over 40 GB), 384 MB RAM and a PIII-900.

What do you recommend, considering the limitations I mentioned, and the fact that I STILL want to have the best possible quality?

[gooki]

I've never delt with DV cameras files on a PC system before (only on a mac and that was many months ago). However Load your two huge ass dv files in unlead and join them together.

Then make sure you save them in their native DV format without any recompressing.

How download nandub and try to open your combinded DV file. If it opens all is good and keep following the instructions below. If it doesn't you may have to convert your DV file into an AVi file, or download the appropriate codecs to get it to open.

Once it's open in nandub follow the sbc guide found here:

http://doom9.org/sbc_main.htm

Starting from step 5.

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Note use the sbc guide to encode the video only.
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As for the audio simply open your combined DV flie in unlead or nandub and save the audio separetly as a .wav file.

Once you have the .wav file use razor lame + lame to encode it as a vbr mp3 file.

Lame can be found here:
http://doom9.org/Soft21/Files/Audio/lame-3.91.zip

Razor Lame GUI can be found here:
http://doom9.org/Soft21/Files/Audio/razorlame114.zip

Make sure you set razor lame to optimize for quality, with a quality setting of nine and i would recomend your bitrate settings to be set arround min bit rate 96 max bitrate 192 for a single disc rip.

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Note: there's probably many different ways of encoding the audio but the method above works for me.
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Hope that helps.

[gooki]

You may want to preform an Inverse Telecine as well to get even better quality video.