Eliasboy, invest in a Canopus ADVC-55 or ADVC-110 (and a firewire card if you don't have one). You can find out more about them at videohelp.com. They'll allow you to digitally capture any composite video signal and lock it to a simultaneous stereo audio signal. Perfect for archiving your VHS tapes before age and oxidation ruin them. I also invested in a DL burner and the latest copy of Nero OEM, the latter of which was only $15. There are freeware tools that may even be better, but for ease of use, this works great for backing up my old video.

Excellent! Thanks for the help. I have everything needed except the Canopus. I'll have to kick around the idea of cracking that set open. It sure as hell isn't doing anybody anygood sealed up. It would definitely make a hell of a nice DVD set.

Sometimes my own stupidity amazes even myself. I forgot about the fact I own a stand alone dvd recorder. The VCR type deal, only DVD. The software I have allows me to easily edit the DVD-VR format it records in. I wonder how good the capture would be on that?

Only one way to find out. ;-)

The one issue you may run into is the need to diable M@cr0v1$!0n. Depends on if M@cr0v1$!0n was used to protect the VHS or not.

Not a problem. If that is present, it can be dealt with.

That sounds a lot like something Tony Soprano would say, come to think of it.

I've backed up a couple of my VHS tapes with the Canopus now and have had great success. A number of trial runs getting familiar, but on the whole, this is dirt simple and the output looks really great with the right tools. Capture the DV signal with WinDV and then convert using the higest bitrate possible with TMPGEnc.

I actually just won a set of the LD's off ebay. We were discussing this over in the preservation thread. It may be something that will need to be done by somebody other than myself if we are going to get the best results.

Having no LD player, I actually just scored the King Kong and Son of Kong double feature on LD. Sending it, along with the Canopus, to my good laserphile buddy who can hopefully get me watching these long-awaited films once and for all.

Working on an extended cut to Blazing Saddles now. Almost done. Darth Editous has given me some good pointers on up-converting FF to Anamorphic.

Harry Potter Movies: I'd love to see a good extended cut of these since they seem to be sitting on their ass instead of doing a real release with as much footage in it as possible. And now to paraphrase myself from another thread:
I've seen copies of a fan edit of Harry Potter Extended Edition (dual channel english/italian) with DVD deleted footage added back in. It's really done well.
The problem is that the ABC TV version have even more content than the deleted footage available on the DVDs, most importantly this includes transitional elements (and music cues) that are missing from the fan edit, making some of the edits a little hard compared to the ABC counterpart.

Yes I put a lot of effort into this, I sat and compared my vid tape of HP1 with an extended cut from the net. I also know for a fact that there was deleted scenes in HP2 on ABC that I've never seen anywhere else (including DVD deleted content) (including the letter from QuikSpell).

What we really need is someone with digital cable/satellite and a TIVO willing to do a PDTV copy for everyone. Heck they broadcasted in HDTV with 5.1 sound! I'm actually surprised that FoV, BT@Efnet, etc. never did these.

Pulp Fiction /DigitalMan: I'm actually not bad with the ripping, anamorphizing, etc. The deleted scenes would also need to be re-encode. I'll take a swing at it this afternoon 'cause I'm bored. I'll let you know how it turns out.

The KwikSpell scene is on the HP2 disc in region1. There were 18 deleted scenes total on that disc. I restored all but one ... of them coming across the car in the woods. That one ruined the surprise reappearance when Aragog's children started to attack Harry and Ron.

I'm going to do this all over again, though, as I wasn't happy with the audio sync.

Was the one with the Italian audio track yours then?

Btw, messed around with Pulp Fiction. Burned a day and it came out crap(ish). The letterboxing is inconsistent from deleted scene to scene. It's encoded as 23.976 (29.97 internally) so if you can keep the computer from telecining on the fly to get to 30fps while you're adjusting the AR you find that you still have interlacing artifacts(!) On top of it you have to re-encode the video to get to anamorphic and the audio has to be run through BeSweet to change the rate from 29.97 to 23.976. Once you've done all that you DO have what you need, but it's a huge pain in the butt.

I assume the full movie is 23.976 progressive film, but I didn't look. If it's the same funky setup as the deleted scenes you have to use DVD Decrypter, VirtualDubMod to demux and then video using 3 filters save as Huffyuv, CCE conversion, DGPulldown, and BeSweet. Yikes this was complicated. There might be an easier way, but none I found that worked.

I haven't tried scenalyzer but I'm open to anything. I know that WinDV has been pretty bulletproof, as it's a no-frills package. I've found firewire drives to be more reliable than IDE drives when capturing. I've had dropped frames on my IDE drive, which have resulted in me trashing a capture and starting all over again.

I do wish the Canopus allowed for captures other than DV. I can't capture an uncompressed signal with it. I was unaware of that when I purchased it, else I'd just have invested in a straight video card. Still, it's been decent. The only truly crummy looking capture I've done so far is The Delicate Sound of Thunder. With all its slo-mo and smoke, the end result really didn't look good, even at 8000 kbits/sec. But with full PCM audio, I had to tell myself, which is more important, to hear the show or to watch the show?

WinDV is freeware. Somebody on the videohelp.com forum recommended it to me.

I'm capturing with composite, but only because I'm capturing from a VCR with no S-Video Output. If you have S-Video, use it. The signal will be far better in my experience. I've obtained a copy of King Kong/Son of Kong on LD that I'm sending to a laserphile friend along with the canopus. His capture will help make an educated statement on the quality of an S-video capture, but I'm expecting great things.

I think i know what your talking about with someone saying not to use svideo...but if i remember (and i may be totally wrong as i really dont know much about this) i think they said that for laserdisc players as most of the players split the signal more or did more processing to the signal when you went through the svideo...but i could be totally wrong.

-Darth Simon

Don't know if you saw this, it was on TheDigitalBits.com:



Do I smell Oz revisited?

I wish they'd reinsert the scene via seamless branching so I wouldn't have to revisit it. But here we go again.

I was this | | close to doing an extended cut of Gladiator when that got announced. Now I'm just going to sit back and wait for Ridley Scott to do the work for me.