Setting for burning Blu-ray from captured VHS tapes

Edmac wrote on 10/15/2015, 7:46 PM

Hi folks,

I am new to the Movie Edit Pro community, but so far I absolutely love the product I bought the MEP 2016 Premium. I have been a Pinnacle Studio user since version 6. My question is, I have captured all my VHS tapes and have begun the process of editing, trimming, etc, and I am now ready to begin burning to Blu-ray Single Layer 25 GB discs.

I see there is great control available as far as bitrate and encoder settings for burning to Blu-ray.

Does anyone have any recommendations for the settings that should be used for simple VHS tapes, given I want to retain the best quality I can since the VHS quality is bad to begin with.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Ed M.

Comments

johnebaker wrote on 10/16/2015, 3:21 AM

. . . . I see there is great control available as far as bitrate and encoder settings for burning to Blu-ray. . . .

There are, however they are not going to make any difference to the quality of the video because the source VHS video is very low resolution - equivalent to 333 x 480 (NTSC) or 335 x 576 (PAL).

Upscaling to HD (1280 x 720) or Full HD (1920 x 1080) is going to introduce artifacts / blocking as each single equivalent pixel is going to be 'magnified', and the image quality is going to be soft.

I would try burning a DVD instead of BD and set the bitrate to the maximum possible consistent with fitting the movie on to the disc and increasing the sharpness of the movie to around 50 - 70 in Effects, Movie Effects settings, Sharpness tab. When you play this on a HD TV you are then dependent on the quality of the upscaling mechanism in the player or TV and these generally are better than trying to upscale in MEP.

HTH

John EB

Edmac wrote on 10/16/2015, 5:49 PM

Thanks for the input John. I actually already have them on DVD, and now I want to consoldate down to BD because of the quantity of discs I have on DVD. BD being approx 5 times the density, I hope to reduce my disc count significantly. I also understand that it will not improve the quality of the video, I am just trying to simplify the number of discs I currently have.

Thanks,

browj2 wrote on 10/16/2015, 7:05 PM

Hi Ed,

I too came here from Pinnacle a few years ago. Still use it for some effects and music.

I haven't tried burning DVD quality to BD to see what happens, so John EB can guide you on that.

However, I use NeatVideo, a plugin, to improve dramatically the quality of my old VHS tapes. It gets rid of a lot of video noise. You might want to take a look; download the demo for Magix. Watch the video to see what it does and how. It is impressive, but will slow down rendering/exporting/burning to a crawl. There is a way to slightly improve the process. Let me know if you want to go there.

johnebaker wrote on 10/17/2015, 4:12 AM

. . . . I actually already have them on DVD, and now I want to consoldate down to BD because of the quantity of discs I have on DVD. . . . .

Do you want to maintain the original DVD menus and have an overall menu for all the movies on BD disc?

What method were you considering using to combine the DVD's together?

My original thought was to use this method and then burn to BD disc using the DVD burn options. However, as I suspected, MEP will not allow you to burn DVD to BD - the disc type is not correct and this error message appears.

There is software available (some of dubious legality) which claim to be able to consolidate DVDs to BD and create a new menu, however I have not tried any of these.

John EB

Edmac wrote on 10/17/2015, 9:23 AM

Hi John EB,

Thanks so much for taking the time and effort to help a new user, I truly appreciate it. For creating the BD content, I have all the original .AVI files, as I am a techie and never delete anything. I actually want to create new movies because it will allow me to do some editing/trimming that I should have done in the first go round when I made the DVD’s 10 years ago. I love adding the chapters and creating the menu’s with MEP, because it is just so easy. The reason I bought the product was because I found it extremely easy to use.

So at this point, I believe my best option is to burn to BD using the H.264 encoder, so it is just a matter of figuring out what setting to use. From what I have been able to figure out, I believe somewhere around 15,000 is the point of diminishing returns, where it doesn’t make sense for any more than that.

As well, wondering what settings for the advanced H.264 section.

Edmac wrote on 10/17/2015, 9:26 AM

Hi John C.B.;

Wow is all I can say after downloading the neatvideo noise effect, it is absolutely amazing the clean up it can do on a VHS input, thank you so much for recommending that. The purchase of the software is a no-brainer because of the easy of use, and the quality of the results, so a huge thank you.

As well, I saw your tutorial on MEP, and again thnak you a fantastic job on it for allowing someone to get up to speed quickly.

Thanks,

johnebaker wrote on 10/23/2015, 5:20 AM

Hi Ed

As far as the BD settings go I tend to use the defaults which are already optimised for best performance vs quality.

The only setting I will sometimes change is the Bitrate and that is upwards never down.

The only time I really change settings is when I want to export for the Internet.

. . . . For creating the BD content, I have all the original .AVI files . . . .

Even better - that makes it much easier for you and you can use the tutorial I pointed you to to create a multi movie disc - space permitting.

HTH

John EB