Hello All,

I'm capturing old NTSC VHS-C tapes to convert to DVD, using a Pinnacle DVC100 USB 2 capture device. It works well, except that a thin band of distortion appears at the bottom of the picture, during capture, playback and in the final dvd product. It looks like the bottom 5 percent of the picture is shifted to the right about an inch.

I've adjusted the tracking on the source camcorder, cleaned the heads, tried different VCRs, to no avail. I read in another forum that there is no way around this because of the way the two heads recorded the video in the original filming (I'm using a Panasonic NV-S250 camcorder).

I borrowed a PCI capture card from a friend, tried various capture software (Ulead DVD Movie Factory 6, Pinnacle Studio 10), experimented with all the softare options, and the problem won't go away. The only option really is to crop the bottom 5 percent of the picture. Can anyone recommend an affordable video capture/editing software (Adobe Premiere can do it, but I don't want to part with 800 dollars for it) that can crop the vertical axis, so I can cut out this annoying band? Or better, anyone suggestions on how to simply eliminate this band of distortion?

Many thanks,

Tjjohn

Analog cameras often have this problem. Not much to do about it other than cropping, which brings it's problems to the party. Cropping requires a decompression stage followed by recompression. The results are seldom pretty.

Virtualdub-MPEG2 can do the decompression, crop and finally recompress and output to avi file. Then for DVD, the AVI file would have to be decompressed, again, then recompressed to MPEG2 DVD requirements. This makes a bad situatuation worse.

Regular CRT type TV sets won't show those lines at the bottom (or the top, or the sides) due to picture overscan. Only LCD, Plasma and computer displays will present them.

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System - Athlon 1.4GHz, Win98, Hauppauge PVR250 receiver and compressor.
Software -Magix Movie Edit Pro 10, Nero 6 + NeroVision Express, Moho 4.61, PSP 8.1, Bryce, Quicktime 6.52 pro, Goldwave 5, DVD-Lab.
Cameras - Panasonic GS9, Canon ES8400V, Canon EOS D20 and Canon A70

Thanks Crusty, I thought there might be an inherent flaw in converting the old VHS-C tapes to DVD format, but only after pulling my hair out trying a dozen different approaches. You're right, cropping is probably the only solution, unless you get into some really high end professional level stuff.

I found a software called AVS Video Editor 3.5 for around 40 dollars. It does offer a tool called image masking which crops the very bottom and top strip for just this sort of problem. The only shortcoming is that you can't choose top or bottom - if you crop the bottom say five percent, the top will be cropped five percent too. I can live with that, since the distortion band at the bottom was really quite annoying. As far as I can see though, it only works for videos you are actually transferring at the moment via the hardware capture device - the software has an import function, but I don't think the cropping tool is available for importing already converted video. Now I can capture directly to MPEG 2 without the distortion strip and edit or burn directly from that.

Thanks again for the advice and insight into this problem.

Cheers,

TJJOHN