• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

LD -> DVD conversion

V

vash

Platinum Member
This summer, I have a bit of an opportunity to learn a bit of DVD authoring on a pro level DVD authoring system (for Mac). Basically, I want to convert a set of LD movies to DVD. The person I plan on visiting has done plenty of DVD authoring before (authors and sells his own audio cds and DVDs), so we figure it can't be too difficult. All the DVDs he has made works in consumer DVD players and DVD-ROMs, so we're confident that these LD rips will come out well. At this point, he has the ability to take the Dolby Digital out on the LD player and Svideo from the LD player, so we know that's the best possible quality we'll ever get on the DVD.

Has anyone done this already? I'm interested in hearing back from people who have converted their collection to DVD. The movie set, in particular, is a 3 LD set, that totals 9 LDs total. We know that the DVD can only be written to 4.7gb and we're pretty sure each movie can be cropped to 2-3 DVDs (hoping more towards the 1 DVD).

If anyone has done this, or investigated this already, please chime in. I'm really interested in what people have to say about this.

vash
 
I don't know about the AC3 rip but the video should be a straightforward capture and re-encoding to DVD compliant MPEG2 format. Quality would be dependent on the capture hardware and encoder, but since you are using professional equipment, that shouldn't be an issue. You can squeeze about 1.5 hours of high quality DVD video on a writeable disc. If you drop the quality a bit, which shouldn't really make much of a difference since LD is a step down from DVD to begin with, 2 hours is easily attainable with very good results.
 
Well, funny you should ask!

I'm currently ripping the three original Star Wars from my Collector's Edition Laser Disk sets and burning them to DVD. I'm in the process of trying to optimize the video quality/bitrate and add some filters to eliminate some of the LD artifact (looks like vertical rows of blocks / stripes...not that bad...but I wanna get the video as clean as possible).

No big deal: Capture, edit out the disk-flips, touch up as desired/necessary, then burn away.

I will probably ony do the Star Wars disks, since Lucas will not release the originals to DVD without screwing them up trying to get the continuity right between the two triplets of movies.

Good Luck

Scott
 
It appears a number of people are doing this. I was planning on doing the same thing with my Star Wars collector LDs as well. I wish GL would release these (Both the original and the SE) on DVD earlier. I am using Pinnacles DV500+ to get the video. What are you using to clean up the video? Thanks.
 
Trying a couple things with a Matrox 2500, also trying some of the filters with Vegas Video and TMPGEnc. I have a Pinnacle Pro One, but it was too unstable and performed poorly. Pinnacle Tech support is worst-of-class and I got tired of dealing with them....so the board came out in favor of the Matrox (which has been working well, but still slower to render than the software CODECs in VV and Tsunami).

What's rendering now is anti-alias + a slight gaussean blur. The preview looks like some of the artifact is still there but I'll wait to see what it looks like through the scaler.

The next iteration, I'm gonna try capturing via the composite connector, maybe the slight degradition will soften the artifact enough.

FWIW

Scott

 
Originally posted by: ScottMac
Well, funny you should ask!

I'm currently ripping the three original Star Wars from my Collector's Edition Laser Disk sets and burning them to DVD. I'm in the process of trying to optimize the video quality/bitrate and add some filters to eliminate some of the LD artifact (looks like vertical rows of blocks / stripes...not that bad...but I wanna get the video as clean as possible).

No big deal: Capture, edit out the disk-flips, touch up as desired/necessary, then burn away.

I will probably ony do the Star Wars disks, since Lucas will not release the originals to DVD without screwing them up trying to get the continuity right between the two triplets of movies.
Click to expand...
Funny you should say that, because that's the specific set I'm going to be working on. It sounds pretty straight forward, rip, save to drive and slice the videos together. I was wondering if anyone has done it already and it does sound like you know what to do. I'm hoping that the SVideo transfer will come out quite well on the DVD, because that's the best quality output that LD player has.

How long do you think it'll take to compress the LDs? I'd prefer not to compress at all, but I don't think that'll be realistic for the DVDs, unless I make each LD a DVD to itself.

vash

 
I've thought of doing something like this myself...out of curiousity, have any of you looked at the quality of the HK DVD boots that were made from the LDs? I see no ethical issue in buying them for those of us who own the LDs, and if the quality is high enough it would save a lot of effort 🙂
 
So far, this is the way it's shaking out:

Star Wars "A New Hope" is just over two hours (with all the lead-ins and final rolling credits). Getting all of this on a single 4.7G (which is really 4.3 GigaBYTES) DVD-R with the same quality of a commercial DVD ain't gonna happen. About the highest bit rate I've been able to swing is about ~3.5 Mbps VBR. It's pretty good quality-wise, but not anywhere close to commercial quality. I'm still working on reducing the artifact from the LD, I don't think I'll be able to totally get rid of it, but if I can reduce it as much as possible and keep the PQ above VHS/SVHS level, I'll be happy.

So far, I've tried the Matrox IBP export, Digigami MPEG2 (1.59, both plug-in and stand-alone), Main Concept MPEG2 (Vegas Video), and Ligo 1.5 (both the Premier plug-in and stand-alone) for export.

I have captured it a couple times, trying VirtualDub with HuffYUV, Matrox capture AVI, Matrox capture MPEG2, Vegas Video with the DV and MC MPEG2, and Radeon 8500DV using their AVI and DV in addition to HuffYUV.

The best result (so far) seems to be a tie between V.V. DV/MPEG2, and Matrox Capture. VirtualDub with HuffYUV was at least as good, but required huge quantities of disk space (and not any real gain in PQ). I would expect that if you have a functioning Pinnacle DV500 or Pro One, their capture would be (at least) comparable.

Tonight / this weekend, I'm gonna try capturing with the composite, and hope it's just fuzzy enough to suppress the artifact.

On a dual Xeon 2.0 (1 Gig of RDRAM, 35G+72G of SCSI hard disk) running XP, the render times are running from a couple hours up to 16 hours (rendering now). The filters add to the render times. Typical has been ~ 7 hours in both V.V. and Premier. The stand-alone encoders (TMPGEnc, Ligos 1.5, and Digigami) run a little faster because they use the multi-processors (Digigami doesn't, and is always the slowest - quality is nice though).

That's the story so far. Perhaps collectively we can come up with a good answer / compromise for PQ and bit rate.

While rendering, I usually dedicate a little time to curse George Lucas for not putting out the originals on commercial DVD. I watched Phantom Menace once then made an ash tray out of it.

FWIW

Scott
 
Would any of you that are doing this be willing to sell copies to those of us who own the LDs but dont want to mess with converting them ourselves? I also have a few movies that I would be willing to ship out to someone with some $$ if they would convert them to DVD for me.

LoRdAccord
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top