Creating Chapters

[zeszut]

I have a DVD of a live opera performance from 1978. It has no chapter divisions. It runs straight through as a 2+ hour performance. I would like to make a backup copy but, for convenience, I would like to add chapters (for each act and scene) of the copy. As you can imagine, it's a major pain to fast forward through an hour of video to get to a specific act or scene.

I have DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink so there's no problem in making a backup copy.

I have already used Decrypter to burn it to my hard drive (4 VOB files created). I tried using NERO 6 to create a new DVD - hoping to add chapters there. But NERO balked after adding 2 of the VOBs when I tried to create a new DVD.

Is there any simple, free software available that would do what I want?

Also, there seems to be some "noise" running along the very bottom of the entire video. Is there some way to eliminate this? I assume it was originally filmed and later transfered to DVD.

Thanks in advance,

Terry

[jggimi]

I can't help you with re-authoring, since I don't make DVDs, but I can answer the question about noise at the bottom of the image. That's most likely head switching noise from a video tape transfer. It should have been removed during the original DVD encoding (along with adding chapters).

[Nick]

As for removing the noise at the bottom, the only way I can see to do that is by completely re-encoding the video.

I am guessing that the original DVD is dual-layer and so needs Shrinking to fit on a DVDR.

Instead of this you could use DVD2SVCD in DVD-output mode. This would re-encode the video, getting better quality than DVD Shrink and also allow you to crop the noise from the bottom. It will, however, take several hours, although works just as well at night when you're asleep :)

You could then author with chapters of your choice in TMPGEnc DVD Author (30 day free trial availble)

If this idea interests you, I could walk you through it in more detail. It is a good deal more work than using Shrink though.

Cheers
Nick

[zeszut]

Hey Guys.

Just to update you ...

I bought a Dazzle 150 with Pinnacle Studio 9 in order to transfer my small (and aging) VHS collection of home movies (themselves transfers of old 8MM) and taped TV progrmas to DVD. After 3 weeks of out-of-sync problems (their forum is full of others having this same problem going back to the beginning of 2004), I gave up and returned the product.

Co-incidently, my stand-alone DVD player of a few years died the week after I returned the Dazzle. I replaced it with a Lite-On DVD player/burner thinking that this would be a way of backup up those old VHS's. It works fine. I can even burn DVDs directly from my cable TV signal.

So, I thought I would attack a set of tapes I have from the 80s. They are commercially produced and will never be re-recorded on DVD. No luck. The DVD burner flagged them as non-copyable.

So, I bought a Sima "Copy This" #CT-1 from Microcenter that I was told would by-pass this restriction. There is some confusion on my part as to whether I should have bought the CT-1 ($50) or their CT-2 ($100) because there is no real description of the differences between the two so I went with the cheaper one. Even the Sima site is not too clear on the differences

It works find and by-passes the copy restriction but I do get nose at the top of the screen. I don't know if this is a problem the more expensive item would address of if it is a general problem.

Nick, you suggested that there is a way to get rid of noise by re-endoding the video. Could you elaborate? The burner produces VOB files. I have DVD Decrypter, DVD Shrink and Nero 6. I'm running XP Home with, unfortunaely from what I'm told, a 1.2Gh Celeron.

Thanks so much in advance,

Terry

PS> I hope there is no confusion so I'm posting this as a new thread also since the current problem does not match the thread title.