Hello all! I have 100+ vhs tapes I want to burn onto dvd-r disc's. I cuurently import them into avid xpress(I do some editing), then transcode to mpeg2, then add chapters with dvdit, then finally burn! As you can see it is a long process. Im new to all of this and need some help, I think. There must be a faster way to do this. I saw some threads on real time, hardware mpeg2 encoding. Is that the fastest method, and is the quality that different? And with the standalone boxes can you do chaptering? And what is the quality of the stand alone? I know this is alot to ask at on time! Thank you for any help
Hardware encoding on my Canopus StormEncoder is real-time (CBR and VBR). The quality is not bad at high bitrates, not so at lower bitrates. I think sw encoders produce a slightly better quality, but it's nice to have the hw encoder for those rushed jobs. The standalones support chapters. My friend's Prioneer something-7000 is a great unit. The only snag is that it supports VBR for only DVD-RW, not DVD-R (not sure why).
thanks for nfo jnihil Are there any good, real time, sw encoders. I believe some sw allows input from fire wire from dv and encodes to mpeg at real time. Im not sure if this is correct, but was told by someone else. If it is true, is this bad quality? Thanks again!
I don't know of any, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any. BUT, you're guaranteed it will not work with a slow(-ish) CPU. Probably need something better than 2GHz. Also, don't expect much 'quality' as realtime encode is a lot to ask for.
