Quote: Vhs is 352x288. So you confirm that this is better to use higher resolution like 640x576@25fps ?

Should I continue to use avi lossless format or is it better to use mpeg2 ?

Analog vhs tape is about 240 lines in horizontal resolution. In the pal system it has 576 scan lines where each field is 288 scan lines. If you capture 352x2888 then you get the full horizontal resolution but effectively deinterlaced the capture video to a progressive format in which one of the two interlaced field is discarded. Your vertical resolution is effectively cut in half. This is the pal vcd resolution and not the pal vhs resolution. It would be better to capture in the ½ DV resolution formats which is 352x576 mpeg-2 which is interlaced if you want to save on disc space. There is no need to use a avi lossless format. I don’t recommend any avi lossless format for vhs as it waste disc space in my opinion.

Again I do not know if France use the pal format for vhs tapes. I cannot get a clear answer on what is the vhs tape recorders format sold in France are from searching the internet.

Hello, Tomasc!

I'd imagine that VHS or Beta VCRs would've been manufactured for France or other territories using SECAM colour encoding, but what a waste! The SECAM system just couldn't cope with the basic functions in a TV studio. I'm sure the French TV stations' execs back then would never have willingly admitted that they had to kit out their stations with German-built PAL equipment, but they had to "bite the bullet" and go with what was the world's best colour TV system, Germany's PAL, which was also superior to America's NTSC. It's why Australia held off introducing colour TV until 1975, we wanted to get the best system.... PAL! New Zealand got in ahead of us by introducing colour TV in mid-1974, but they also chose the PAL system. SECAM today is largely a forgotten, discredited system, Cyberlink's Power Director and Power Producer(all versions to date) never included it, nor did any other make of video editing software. Anyone who suggested including it would've been laughed out of the room!

Cheers!

Neil.

I beleive that PD14 capture in the sp mode is 352x576 resolution interlaced 25 fps for 4x3 pal and that is really all you need. Produce and creating a dvd in the 4x3 sp mode as Neil suggest again is all you need. SmartFit is good too for such a dvd.

The HQ capture mode and HQ mpeg-2 dvd formats are necessary for say s-vhs and hi-8 tapes to get the full resolution. Again this is for pal. Don't know anything about secam.

Side disscution follows, skip is don't care about technical details.

Today there are no more PAL, SECAM or NTSC. Digital signals don't have those characteristics, those where purely analog standards. Even the FPS numbers are irrelevant, any digital TV can synchronize with any of the ones used today: 23.976, 24, 25, 29.97, 30, 50, 60. Personal use videos should be taken at the highest framerate available, without any considerations for "PAL" vs "NTSC" - unless you are shooting commercials for a TV station it makes no difference.
For example, in US the broadcasters send live sporting events in 59.94i, normal live shoots at 29.976p, but the studio shots at primetime are at 23.976 - this is for maximum quality per given bandwidth in the allowed "Over The Air" channels (and the TV decoders receive a "flag" that forces them to upscale all that to 59.94p). On a memory stick used at home there is no such bandwidth limitation or studio syncronisation issues, so 60p should be used whenever you can.

As a side note, France wanted to protect their TV industry, so they created SECAM (exported it to most of Russia and eastern block, also in middle east). Not bad for a transmission standard, impossible to work in studio.
But that wasn't enough, the neighbors TV programs would still be seen in B/W, so they inverted the B/W polarity too in their TV standard - everyone in the world had it negative, they made in positive.
Recording on VHS in France was done proprietary (same protectionist reasons), for the rest of the world a PAL recorder could record a SECAM signal with a small trick - so called the MESECAM tape standard. That way the original SECAM signal could be played on a PAL machine and send to a SECAM TV.
Moronic legislators thinking they know what's better for their sheep - soon the market was full of multistandard TV's (NTSC/PAL/SECAM at 50/60Hz with all the sound standards too - I had one when living in Europe). Except in France where it was "illegal" to import a multistandard TV.

Hi, SoNic67!

While the digital system has, as you say, bypassed the PAL/NTSC/SECAM system melee, there is still the "ghost" of PAL & NTSC in our editing & burning videos, even when sourced from digital cameras. So though SECAM has finally been excorcised, the ghosts of PAL and NTSC continue to haunt our system, just look at the parameters when next you edit or burn a disc, you'll be asked whether to burn to PAL or NTSC standards, so those ghosts still haven't learned yet that they're dead! (Boo! LOL) As for the French guarding their precious TV industry? Stubborn buggers, those French! It's only since the advent of the SBS TV network here in Australia that we saw any French series or movies, they really didn't have much to offer, SBS was the only network here that showed any interest, our ABC had the short "Miniscule" nature spoof series, but that's all, so to protect their shows by creating their own colour TV system was a waste of time and effort. As I'd already said, the SECAM system was plagued with problems from the outset so the French would've been better-served to just bite the bullet and go cap-in-hand across the border and ask those nice German folks if they would supply all the necessary gear to run a PAL-standard system. Would've saved a lot of headaches in the long run!

Cheers!

Neil.

Quote: I beleive that PD14 capture in the sp mode is 352x576 resolution interlaced 25 fps for 4x3 pal and that is really all you need. Produce and creating a dvd in the 4x3 sp mode as Neil suggest again is all you need. SmartFit is good too for such a dvd.

The HQ capture mode and HQ mpeg-2 dvd formats are necessary for say s-vhs and hi-8 tapes to get the full resolution. Again this is for pal. Don't know anything about secam.

I have been follow your instructions. Unfortunately quality is not here. The mpeg2 compression makes to much artefacts compare to the avi file. I will try to increase the bitrate but currently quality is not enough for archives.

Hello all!

Something I tried last night(Australian time) has confirmed to me once and for all why I was wise to retain PD8(Ultra) for DVD authoring.

I tried to burn a DVD of my two recent videos, using PD14(Ultra). The videos were "The Sydney Tramway Museum"(1 hour, 3 minutes, 57 seconds, 1.65 GB) and "Steamfest 2016"(45 minutes, 33 seconds, 1.18 GB), the playing times and file sizes for each are shown in brackets. Going to the "Create Disc", I pulled in the first-mentioned title, as it was intended as the leading item. In spite of its file size, the display at bottom-left of screen showed the video to go well over the capacity of the destination DVD (4.7 GB). I ignored that for the moment and proceeded to add the chapters, taking the file momentarily into the editing window and setting 10 evenly-spaced chapters, did likewise with the second title, then, after editing the details in the Menu, I was ready to burn the disc, the display at bottom-left was now showing the content to be up over 8 GB, which, of course was nonsence as the file size of each, all up would not quite reach 3 GB. This told me that the files were deemed to be DVD-HQ, even though I rendered them as DVD-SP(these videos were shot with a Canon Legria digital camera, by the way). So I set the burn quality to "Smart Fit", that showed the display to drop back to around the 4.9 GB range, I clicked to burn this disc anyway. A window appeared asking me if I was sure there was enough capacity on the disc for this project, I clicked OK and "set the wheels in motion". A bit over an hour later came the result: Another drink coaster!, Yep, burning unsuccessful! Contrast this with later in the evening when I did the project in PD8 Ultra, PD8 recognised the files were in DVD-SP, the total file size with a first-play video added, came to 3.272 GB and the burn proccess took no more than 12 minutes and 7 seconds, Burn Successfull! Wunderbar! So now you know why I stick to PD8 for burning discs. PD14 is good for editing but PD8 still trumps it when it comes to DVD authoring.

Cheers!

Neil.

Did you review the burned disc/s Neil - I'm not saying just a quick look at them - did you watch them for their entire production time? Are they identical to what you had edited and expected? Did all the menus show up in the burned disc too?

I'm just curious and wonder if PD8 took some edits out of the production or just what might be happening there.

CS PD13 Ultimate - Build 3516, WIN 8.1, 64 Bit, 16G RAM, Intel Core i5 4460, CPU @ 3.2GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GT720, Graphics Memory(total avail.)-4093MB
LG WH14NS40 Blu-Ray Drive

Quote: Did you review the burned disc/s Neil - I'm not saying just a quick look at them - did you watch them for their entire production time? Are they identical to what you had edited and expected? Did all the menus show up in the burned disc too?

I'm just curious and wonder if PD8 took some edits out of the production or just what might be happening there.

CS

Hello, CS!

I do check out a disc that I've burned in PD8, either on the computer(Windows Media Centre opens up) or on a standard domestic player, and yes, the menus show up okay. PD8 does not extract anything from the content when burning a disc. The only time PD8 would "extract" anything is by editing in PD8, as you know, PD8 does not feature "cross" transitions, the transition effect is overlap only and the effect there is that the overall length of a video is shortened by the length of the transition, multiplied by the number of transitions applied(10 transitions @ 5 secs = 50 secs lost in length). As it is, I'm editing in PD14 and using a mix of "cross" and "overlap" transitions, using a "suck it and see" method to check which transitions cause the momentary freeze in cross, then setting them back to overlap. I mention that as a side issue. But I've had no problems in burning discs using PD8. How long is it since you last used PD8, CS? Is PD8 still installed on your computer? If so, it still has its uses. There are features in PD8 that should've been retained in PD14 or should be brought back for PD15.

Cheers!

Neil.

Neil.. I don't think I've ever had 'PD8'.... (THAT's for YOU Barry.. lmao). I've got PD12 and pd13 on this computer so I can not relate to whatever PD8 does or may do Neil.

But this thread has to do with "picking file format for production".... so...

CS PD13 Ultimate - Build 3516, WIN 8.1, 64 Bit, 16G RAM, Intel Core i5 4460, CPU @ 3.2GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GT720, Graphics Memory(total avail.)-4093MB
LG WH14NS40 Blu-Ray Drive

Quote:

Quote: I beleive that PD14 capture in the sp mode is 352x576 resolution interlaced 25 fps for 4x3 pal and that is really all you need. Produce and creating a dvd in the 4x3 sp mode as Neil suggest again is all you need. SmartFit is good too for such a dvd.

The HQ capture mode and HQ mpeg-2 dvd formats are necessary for say s-vhs and hi-8 tapes to get the full resolution. Again this is for pal. Don't know anything about secam.

I have been follow your instructions. Unfortunately quality is not here. The mpeg2 compression makes to much artefacts compare to the avi file. I will try to increase the bitrate but currently quality is not enough for archives.

Hello, Theolilou!

From what little, and brief encounter I've had with AVI, I offer this warning: AVI files are huge in comparison to others(MPEG2, MP4 etc) unless you have some means to reduce the file size(compress it). A while back, a friend gave me a disc containing five full-length feature movies in a compressed AVI file type. I was astounded to see that each of them averaged little more than 650 megabytes per file, therabouts. I investigated the AVI feature in Power Director and, in either DV-AVI, or Windows AVI, there was absolutely no way I could get such a low file size as this. I toyed with the idea for a moment, I set a movie I had on my timeline to produce in AVI, then looked at that "pie chart" display would be used(and I think a figure of gigabytes was also displayed). What I saw well-and-truly dissuaded me from clicking "produce" I immediately chose MPEG2 and produced to that file type instead. Suffice to say, I won't go anywhere near AVI again.

Cheers!

Neil.

Neil,
The AVI as you refer to it for DV-AVI and Windows-AVI are two distinct variants. The latter, Windows-AVI is uncompressed and is suitable for use with 4:3 video only. It degrades in quality with continued rendering. The DV-AVI uses a compressed loss-less codec which can be switched out to a different loss-less codec. The DV-AVI enables an editor to return video to a miniDV tape source and was the first loss-less option for editors who capture footage from tape where it retained the full quality of video. MiniDV/DV-AVI used the 4:3 frame size of Standard Definition but could be adapted to display/capture video to 16:9. Due to its loss-less capabilities it is one option an editor can take if they want to preserve the full quality of capturing from miniDV tape.

You have directed editors here, wandering as you do, to pursue the mpeg2 capture route because you prefer that option and you consider it the best. Capturing from tape to mpeg2 is to a compressing codec while the capture is taking place. The computer processing to mpeg2 on the fly and the resulting compression is dependent upon your computers capability to process and store the data. It is efficient but only if you intend to retain everything as mpeg2, it isn't so great if an editor intends to compress the video into different or other formats, if one wants to retain sharp clear video from Standard Definition video. An editor should capture video at the best they can and then edit to the format/output/production they want.

As the OP hasn't responded in this thread for a while, I'm locking the thread.

Dafydd