[MacDV] Video project - VHS to DVD to DV to DVD

[Richard Dalziel Sharpe]

>

Hi Robert.
I can think of two alternatives that are reasonable given your level of 
expertise.
The first is the more difficult the second will mean re doing your step 
two.
You could convert the DVD back to almost any QuickTime format to edit 
it.
If you want to use iMovie 4 as your editor then it will probably be 
best to convert it to DV.
There are many shareware and free ware applications that will do this, 
varying hugely in complexity and usability, I use DVDx DVPro. This does 
a good job of converting and is reasonably easy to use. A trial version 
is available so you can give it a go to see what you think of the 
quality. Remember that every conversion you make will lower the 
quality.
My strong recommendation is to capture your VHS tapes to a DV camera, 
thus converting them to DV and then capturing the resulting files onto 
your Mac. Some DV cameras will allow you to play through to  your Mac 
thus saving time.

Hope this helps.
Richard Dalziel-Sharpe
Australia


> On 16/09/2004, at 10:45 AM, Robert L. Vaessen wrote:
> Recently, we (Myself and some of the other cast members) decided that 
> we had enough computing hardware, expertise, software to move the 
> movie to DVD in an effort to re-master and preserve our favorite 
> movie.
>
> Thus began a great quest; an epic restoration project unlike anything 
> we had ever experienced before.
>
>
> The challenge defined
> ---------------------
> Here are the steps that define our project. Steps have changed/evolved 
> as the project moved forward. I've spent well over three weeks just 
> getting to step 2, and I've got two coasters already.
>
> + Step 1: Obtain original footage on VHS.
> Completed: Two VHS tapes were located. One raw footage, one edited 
> production copy. Quality was poor but legible.
> + Step 2: Convert analog VHS to DVD. We probably should have gone 
> straight to DV, but we didn't...
> Completed: Two DVDs produced using a hardware analog to DVD converter. 
> The conversion process stabilized the tracking, eliminated some video 
> artifacts, and improved the overall quality of the movie. The DVDs 
> contain a VIDEO_TS folder with the following contents (from now on I 
> will only refer to one of the DVDs).
> + Step 3: Take the DVD and read the data back into the computer. Need 
> to do this in order to perform video and audio editing of the movie 
> using iMovie.
> + Step 4: Take the DVD data, now that it's back on the computer and 
> convert it into a format that iMovie can read.
> + Step 5: Edit the movie using iMovie.
> + Step 6: Save the iMovie output in a format that can be read by iDVD.
> + Step 7: Use iDVD in order to add menus, and burn the re-mastered 
> data back onto a DVD.