Encoding from VHS

[MrBassman]

Hi All.

I have had Pinnacles DV Studio 7, (you know what I mean), and the Firewire card for a good old while now, and I am wanting to get some tips & starting points, so I don't keep stumbling around wasting my time.

I have recently tried using Adobe Premiere 6 and am happy, although I am not able to get good quality MPG. I have tried the panasonic plug-in and Cinema Craft, (CCE plug-in is stuck on 1 frame/ps and the standalone gives me a disc write error 5 minutes in?)

I want to edit some of my VHS recordings using my PC. I capture using the throughput of a DV camera, (this changes the video to DV format, is this ok?), and premiere, (I can only capture from DV tape using Studio 7 editor?)

I really want to get the best quality from the VHS source that I can. I was considering converting to vcd, mpg, and also outputting back to DV so I can record onto DVD-r using my Panasonic DVD-RAM recorder.

I have tried setting up using TMPGenc to convert the DV AVI file using "Frame serving" instructions I found. Unfortunately, TMPGenc tells me that the frame server is down? (I imagine that I have not set it up correctly, but I don't know what I have done wrong).

Basically, as I am sure you can tell, I need simple straightforward advice. Links to progs or archives required. Ideas and tips to getting the best results.

Thankyou to everyone who is good enough to help...

[TiKin]

I have a RADEON 64 DDR VIVO and I use it for VHS or TV capturing. I use PowerVCR II 3 Deluxe and TMPGEnc Plus to encode it to anything (DVD,SVCD, VCD, and other).

When I captured from VHS with the highest quality setting from PowerVCR II(mpeg2-excellent), I was surprise how good the capture quality (much better than VHS that was recorded from, almost DVD quality). I don't have a DVD burner, so I have to encode it to SVCD or VCD with TMPGEnc Plus. I am sticking to VCD and the quality still good, because SVCD takes one more hour to encode on my machine and it takes up more spaces.

So I am very happy with my result after many tries with many different softwares and encodings.