vhs to dv to....

[davey_fl]

So I needed to import a vhs tape for burning to dvd - and the only way I can get the source is to first move it over to my DV cam, and then use firewall and save as a type 1 avi. Watching the source footage on the computer, I see scan lines down each side of the avi, as well as a little bit at the bottom. I'm assuming this is the "extra" info a vhs tape stores. My question is, should I crop this out or when I burn to dvd and watch on a tv I won't see the lines? I'd hate to crop to some oddball size, then burn to 720x480 and have it image all distorted...

thx

davey

[IJM]

I think what you're talking about is the usual VHS rubbish down the sides and along the bottom of the picture. All this is in the overscan area so if you encode it as full D1 720x480 and burn it to DVD-Video, you won't see it on a TV anyway.

But if you really want to be neat, trim 16 pixels off each side and top and bottom and add a 16 pixel black border all the way round. This puts the border on a macroblock boundary, so whatever MPEG2 encoder you use won't have a difficult time encoding your nice straight edges. You won't see this border on a TV because it's all in the overscan area anyway.

Whatever you do, you don't really want to resize it.

I hope this helps.

Ian.

[Mug Funky]

you see vertical lines down the side? that's peculiar. all i can think of for that would be the sync pulses, and it'd take an oddball camera to record those...

but the bottom stuff is garbage and should be blacked out as above (this will increase compressibility too, so your DVD will look better).