videorb

I've spent the past week or so trying to make a DVD from an old VHS tape of home movies shot behind-the-scenes of the 1988 Lucasfilm adventure, Willow. The experience reminded me of a few things I hadn't thought about in a while (e.g. I am a huge Willow nerd) and taught me a few new things (e.g. I am a well-connected huge Willow nerd). The tips below are primarily intended to save me some trouble the next time I want to make a DVD, but maybe somebody else out there will find them useful, too.

• Optimize your system to avoid dropped frames.

  I bought an inexpensive digital camcorder (a Canon ZR60) on eBay for the express purpose of converting obsolete VHS tapes to DV, and by all accounts it does a great job. Now you might think that once the video is in a digital format, transferring it to your PC would be a piece of cake, like copying a file from one PC to another over a network. Wrong! The tech gurus who dreamt up a way to store video on digital tape somehow failed to anticipate the need to reliably transfer that video off of the tape. So, video is streamed from the camera, and because there's no pacing mechanism, the inability of your PC to keep up with the stream will result in dropped frames.

  Thank God these guys didn't invent email. Can you imagine receiving messages with random words simply missing?

  Whatever; we gotta deal with it. Shut down all non-essential programs (including the hidden ones appearing only in the Windows Task Manager) and make sure compression is disabled for the destination hard drive.

• Keep it compressed.

  DV is not just short-hand for "digital video"; it's also a family of codecs (i.e. compression algorithms, like MPEG). The video on your camera is compressed using one of these codecs, and when you transfer it to your PC, it stays compressed. Since compression is synonymous with loss of quality, you may be tempted to use uncompressed video for intermediate video files.

  Resist the temptation. Uncompressed video requires an absurd amount of disk space: hundreds of GB for something feature length. Since the source files are DV-compressed, it's best to stick with a DV codec like DVSoft.

• MPEG encoding: Patience is power.

  Once you've edited together the final version of your video, there are a number of ways to create a DVD-compliant MPEG. A single-pass, constant bitrate encoding can be created in an hour or so; but it will look awful, with all the digital artifacts one associates with VH1 Classic (or another similarly abused digital cable offering). Select a multi-pass, variable bit rate encoding instead; it might take a couple of days, but when it's finally done you'll have trouble telling the MPEG from the original.