the-bright-side

Hello Original Trilogy members! Occasional lurker here, and I had to sign up when I saw this thread about DPS.

I digitized the Laserdisc (which, for the record, I own) last year at a friend's place. Got a decent result, but not nearly as nice as I would have hoped.

The recording software we used didn't crop the image, so the video has the LD's 4:3 format with black bars, and in the black bars, there's a big green bar that has image corruption. Also, there are small black borders to the left and right. In addition, since the video was recorded off the LD player without any colour correction, is it washed out. At the beginning of side 3, the video and sound are out of sync for about 30 seconds.

The video weighs over 5 GB and when I compress it (using H.264), the grain (already slightly affected by MPG compression) turns into complete mush. So I used MKVmerge to splice my 3 MPG source files together and applied parameters that crop away the ugly parts.

Now, if I play the MKV back in VLC Media Player, it reads those parameters correctly and plays the movie without the borders. I also use VLC's built-in equalizer to correct the colours and contrast and it looks okay. So I can play it back well enough (only the out of sync part remains) on my PC with a specific software and some tweaking.

But all of this is only done during playback - the original file still has washed-out videos with black borders and the corrupted green bar.

I believe people who know their video editing kung fu could do this much better. So I thought I'd revive this thread... Anybody succeed at making a nice, working DVD copy from the Laserdisc?