Edward Troxel

[Richard Jones]

Hi,

I know the subject has been covered in the forums but only piecemeal and wonder if it might be worth doing an article or series of articles for the Newsletter to bring these all together ( and perhaps fill out on some of the missing detail) as I suspect there must be many people who have edited their films to VHS who would now like to transfer them to DVD.

The article could cover, for example:-

1. The pros and cons of using a commercial machine which has both a VHS and a DVD drive. Are there any quality issues to be considered and how effective is the conversion to mpeg2? And are there aspect problems as much of the VHS material will probably be 4:3 compared with the modern 16:9? If there are any quality issues how might these be addressd?

2. How to transfer the VHS images to the PC and what connections should be made between the VHS Player, the conversion box and the PC. What are the best connections (e.g. SCART from the VHS Player, whether the Red, White and Yellow plugs can be used and the merits of making a connection to the PC via USB2 or Firewire). Again the question of quality comes into play and advice about this would be helpful.

3. Is it preferable to import (capture) direct to Vegas rather than the Hard Drive and, if so, how this should be done. Presumably the set-up in 2 above will work - or will it? Will the Capture from External Video application be appropriate and will this allow Batch Capture (and what happens about the scene by scene capture default if Batch Capture is not used)? What are the problems that need to be considered (e.g. aspect ratios, format issues, pixel size etc) and how are these to be dealt with (presumably some of the Preferences will need to be changed but which ones)? If a film is transferred in this way it can presumably be edited in the usual Vegas way but how can Vegas be used to address any loss of quality that might have occurred. And will the Pan and Crop tool have to be brought into play? Etc., etc.

Is this a big ask? I think it probably is for which I offer my apologies whilst at the same time thanking you again for the excellent work you do.

Regards,

Richard Jones