Capturing Home Movies to DVD

[Jolard]

Ok, looking for some suggestions. I have been playing around with capturing video and creating custom home movie DVD's for about a month, and I think I have worked out most of the kinks, but have a need for some help.

Here is my process currently:

- Plug my camcorder into my Gainward Geforce 2 Ti VIVO with s-video.
- Capture video using VirtualDub and huffyuv. I have been capturing at full DVD resolution (720x480). No problems there, seems to be good quality and no excessive frame drops (about 5 each hour of video).
- Transcode with TMPGenc using 2 pass VBR at 4000 average. Seems to be fine. I have tried using a few of the filters, but I am not sure what they do, and I am fairly happy with the quality without them.
- DVD author with SpruceUp.

This process works great if I just capture one big file from the beginning of the home movie to the end. I am happy with the results in this circumstance.

Ok, here are my questions:
- When should I edit my video? I want to cut out dead space, and edit various clips from the home movies together. Should i do it on the huffyuv avi or should I wait until it is transcoded to MPEG2?
- What program should I use for this editing? I have tried a movie making program that came with my card, but I am not happy with it.
- I thought about taking the vairous clips, and just adding them individually to SpruceUp as one media resource after another. This works, but the clips don't play directly from one to the next (I guess spruceup is treating them as seperate titles, and so they don't play straight through. So I believe I need to do this editing somewhere else before importing the movie to SpruceUp.
- I understand the need to not re-encoding after editing, if I am editing the MPEG2 file. Any thoughts on how this will impact what I do around that?

Thanks for your help. I have read the guides, read the forums, read the rules. Just need this extra step.

[dar1us]

You should always do any editing when the source is as pure as it is ever going to be. This is at the original recording (in huffyuv) - edit out the boring parts in VirtualDub (for simplicity) in Huffyuv.

Then do whatever else you may want to, finally, do the MPEG encoding.

This will retain as much quality as possible at will give you a better resulting DVD.

You can do all the cutting and joining in VirtualDub that you want. Keeping it in HUFFYUV to do all of this is good because you will get a frame accurate selection always. It wont wait for a keyframe before it is cut.

[matrix]

Avisynth.
Edit any way you want.
With one script, you can cut it into pieces, put them back together in any order, add filters if you want, and then encode it as a big file.

[dar1us]

I thought that VirtualDub would be a foolproof solution, no learning required.

[Jolard]

Thanks for the suggestions. I figured editing earlier was better than later, but the files are just so damned big. Would it be worth capturing with Picvideo MJPEG, or will I lose too much quality from the huffyyuv?

[bb]

If you'd like to add titles, transition effects, audio effects and comments, etc., then you better use a video editor like Ulead MediaStudio Pro, Adobe Premiere, etc.

You don't have a DV camcorder, do you?

bb

[Jolard]

No digital camcorder unfortunately.

I have a basic video editor that should work just fine for what I want. So that should work ok.

The biggest issue is trying to work with the huge files, especially since I want to burn 2 hour DVD's. So I need to have more than two hours of uncompressed video that I am editing, to get down to two hours of uncompressed video that I then compress and burn to DVD. That is more space than I have, which is why I was thinking of compressing before editing. Oh well, need a new hard drive.

[bb]

You should get good quality when capturing through PicVideo's MJPEG codec at quality 19 or 18. If you edit that one with your "basic video editor", you can save the edited stuff again as MJPEG without losing much quality. It's a recompression, though, thus you'll loose a bit. If your video editor is smart enough, then it won't recompress unedited parts. Then transcode to MPEG-2.

If you need to cut you footage only (no transitions or other editing specials), then you can easily use VirtualDub to cut unwanted frame ranges. Use "Save processing settings" to get a .vcf file. Then my tiny tool "vcf2avs_gui" (search for it here on the forum) will convert the .vcf file to a .avs file, which you need to supplement with a simple AviSource command at the beginning. Of course you can add many more AviSynth commands, if you like. Open the .avs file in TMPGEnc and encode. By the way: make sure that you use SSRC and tooLame as external tools for the audio to get much better quality (see TMPGEnc's environmental settings).

bb

[Jolard]

Thanks bb for all the excellent suggestions.

[bb]

You're welcome. I'd appreciate if you posted your results.

bb