making movies

[bailey]

well I might as well get my fet wet too
here is what I got
sony dru-500ax
ati aiw 8500 128
light-on dvd rom

a big box of vhs tapes
2 vhs decks

I want to put the tapes on the dvd's

so I need to play the tapes as if it was a tv
then while it is playing, capture it to my hard drive inthe correct format ( resulation ) so that dvd studieo can render it as a movie file ( mpeg-2 ) then use the burner to burn it to the cdon a dvd+ disk

is this correct ?

I tried to use preimer but it would not reconized thr ati file extension
that it was saved to the hd with.
what am I doing wrong.

[Force Flow]

You are capturing the VHS film with Premiere, correct? I believe it saves the actual movie files as avi, by default. Look in the "x:\program files\adobe\premiere" folder (and possibly sub folders) for the captured movie. It goes in the program's folder by default.

[edit]: just thought this should go with it ;)

[bailey]

premier will not reconized ati capture card

so have to do capture with the card its self
or try to do it with dvd studieo then after editing , click on make movie, it them creates a mpeg-2 file that then can be burned with nero

hey that is neat,

[Force Flow]

It won't be recognized? Strange...

What version of premiere do you have, what's the ATi card model, and what O/S are you running?

[Xayd]

Careful that you're not using ATI's proprietary MPEG-2 codec! They have one, and it'll be the default option when capturing.

Note that you might have to re-encode your audio as well. MPEG-2 audio isn't valid for NTSC, only PAL. A standalone DVD player will only accept Dolby Digital, MPEG-1, or LPCM for audio on an NTSC DVD.

[bailey]

primere ver 6.o1, the ati card is not suported by adobe for capture device
yes I was useing the encodeing that came with it.
I don't know any better, have never done anything like this before so it is all new to me.
my first experment was to capture 15 min of tv movie and burn it to a dvd and play it back just to see how it does

the ati card is the ati aiw 8500 128 meg ddr ram

[Xayd]

You won't be able to capture with Premiere, the initial recording is gonna have to be done with the ATI software. After you've gotten an MPEG-2 file you can then edit it, though.

When you open up the ATI TV software, go to setup, digital VCR, "set custom". Select the "best quality" option and edit it.

720 x 480 is the standard NTSC TV full-screen resolution. Make sure you select MPEG-2 for the video rather than MPEG-1 in this screen.

Audio, stereo or mono is up to you, if you have stereo inputs and a stereo source, feel free to use it.

P frames and B frames and I frames. A good explanation of what they do is here in this article at Tom's...
http://www4.tomshardware.com/video/20010524/video_capture-02.html
A good setting to start with quality and size wise for the purposes of the ATI software is 4 P frames and 2 B frames per group/subgroup.

In the next page, you've got the option for variable bit rate, be sure and turn it on. That's the whole benefit of MPEG-2 over MPEG-1, you can use a variable bitrate (higher on high action scenes, lower on low action scenes) to reduce the size of the final video.

Motion estimation is a concept similar to prediction frames, in that the encoder can predict from scene to scene what most parts of the image should look like, seeing as only part of the image will be moving. The default setting of 75 is ok here.

That's about it, click finish.

Now you've got a custom set of settings to use, just set the ATI software to use the settings you just created and off you go. Hit record when you're ready to record in the main ATI TV window and stop when you're done.

The ATI software is gonna give you an MPEG-2 video and MPEG audio as a final product, so unless you need to edit the video further after capture, you could go straight to whatever authoring program you have at this point, assuming it can take the MP2 file and assuming that you have a file that's not over 4.36 gigs ;).

If your file is over 4.36 gigs, you can re-encode it with a lower bitrate to shrink the size of the final video (probably without much if any loss in noticable quality).

You'd need to look into an MPEG-2 encoder such as TMPGENC (http://www.tmpgenc.net) to do that with. You'd start with a program to separate the audio and video into seaprate files such as dvd2avi (http://www.divx-digest.com/software/dvd2avi.html ). But all of that would really be another topic for another post (i.e. a whole new can of worms ;)).