Hi everyone. I'm a huge football fan and have hundreds of tapes waiting to be transferred to DVD but I'm only new to video capturing so I'm pretty lost when it comes to trying to figure out the ideal settings to get the best quality possible. Just so you know, I use CyberLink PowerDirector v6.

Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone could tell me the ideal settings to use. Eg:

*Do I record to MPEG-2 Video, AVI, DivX?
*What do I set the resolution and bit-rate etc. as?
*Do I using smoothing and noise removal?

Basically, just any tips that can help me get the best quality for football matches.

Please forgive me if some of these questions are a little stupid, I'm pretty clueless when it comes to this sort of stuff.

Here is a screenshot of an example I have recorded... notice the jagged edges, the blur etc.:

Do you just want to make dvd copies of your old vhs tapes or do you want edit them aswell?

Well for the most part I want to edit them. Although if that is going to degrade the quality by a fair amount then I guess I'd be happy to just make exact copies. Is that what you would recommend?

Direct copies from vhs to dvd can be done by hooking up a vhs deck to a home dvd recorder. Put the tape in the vhs deck and a blank disc in the dvd recorder. Set the recording quality to the highest setting on the dvd recorder and press play on the vhs deck and record on the dvd recorder. You should get about an hour of recordiing on the blank disc, so get ready to stop at around 50 - 55 minutes. Some dvd recorders will not finalize the disc if you let the recording go to the end. I had a Sony dvd recorder a few years ago and if you didn't stop it before the disc was full, it messed up the finalize option.

There are two ways to connect your vhs deck to the computer. Either connect the vhs deck to a mini dv camcorder that has av in sockets and firewire out, which you will connect to a firewire socket on your computer and just capture to the hard disk. Or is you don't have access to a mini dv camcorder you will need some type of analogue capture device, they are becoming more difficult to find now. You either install it inside your computer or if it has a usb connection, use that to connect it to the computer.

Thanks for the tips, I know someone who has a DVD burner so I'll give that a try

try divx and use one of the preset profiles.

I think Sahafan is looking for a complete solution for capturing vhs to dvd rather than an individual codec.

ah but what i meant was use what ever capture device he already has and try using different codecs

Ah but what Nikosony meant was this thread has nothing to do with codecs. Whatsover.

Is it just me?

__________________
Crane operators stick it in the air and swing it around...

Why did I become a Video Editor? Well, To cut a long story short....

So...

Thats just how i interperated his or her's post