Another VHS to DVD question - black bar...

[TSaraber]

The question is this... I am using an ATI Radeon All In Wonder 7500 to capture my home movies in Mpeg2 format to put onto DVD. When I watch the movie as it's capturing it looks just fine. But when I preview the capture there is this nasty 1/4 black bar running down the left hand side. Any idea how to make it stop doing this? I know it can be done because I've done it before but I got lucky, because I have no idea how I did it.

Let me just say that this whole process has been a nightmare. One problem after another, first the capture had minnie mouse sound - I get that fixed and now the black bar. I also made 6 coasters with my dvd burner before I got a clue and started using Nero.

I'm working with a freshly formatted computer at the moment so if you think the software may be the culprit here's the list: Windows ME, the lastest drivers for my ATI video card, Microsoft media encoder and DirectX 9.0 (which the ATI drivers claim to need installed)
Ulead Video Studio 6, and the Elecard Decoder that I need in order to watch anything I capture. Don't like the white square effect but I'm willing to put up with it as long as the end result is a good copy of my home movie on dvd.

That about covers it. Thanks in advance for your time!!

[rsquirell]

Upgrade ME to XP if you're gonna do video. ME won't allow capture or transfer of files between drives of files >4GB. After installing XP and updates convert all drives to NTFS from Fat32 (which, also, won't allow file transfer >4GB). The black bars on the sides are normal...when you capture VHS tape of a TV show sometimes you'll see a line at the top of the video with moving black and white beads...this is closed capturing info from the TV....and sometimes there's a small out-of-focus group of lines at the bottom (caused by the way NTSF VHS heads are angled). All of this marginal stuff gets "overscanned" by the TV if the DVD is played on a stand-alone player...but will be visible if played on the PC or TV connected to the PC. If you really want to get rid of it, TMPGenc has a "clip frame" feature which allows you to trim off the edges.

[TSaraber]

Thanks so much for your reply! I had ran into the 4GB limit thing but I find that with Ulead, it's actually best for editing if I stick with smaller file sizes. When I capture, I have it set to slice up the video automatically every 650MB and then I piece it back together with Ulead - which I have to use anyway to edit out the bad sections of the video. When I tried editing larger files it was sloooooooow! Trying to move to the sections that needed to be cut out took forever.

Anyway - I think I figured out what is going on, sounds like it may be related somewhat to your post.

I captured all my personal home movies just fine, no black bar at all in those. When I got to this last video the line showed up - it so happens this video was made with another camcorder so I'm guessing that's where the bar comes from. I had tested another vhs tape of tv shows and the bar was still there so I assumed something was broken. However I just checked out one of my previously captured tapes and it still works fine.

Would have been nice if I'd thought to check the other tapes before I spent two days trying to fix something that apparently isn't broken. I guess I'm making this process way harder than it needs to be.