I've got around 100 hours of old TV shows I'd like to transcribe to VCD. In a perfect world, I would hook up my VHS deck to a video capture card, press play on the VCR and capture an hour of video. Then I'd use a program like Premiere to edit out the commercials, hit some magic button called "Make Video CD," stick a blank CD in my CD witer and a little while later I'd have a VCD I can play in my DVD player. And it would look nearly as good as my VHS tape.

Is this just a dream, or is it attainable?

-- Mojo (mojo@foundation-i.com), November 10, 2000

Answers

Attainable, but with a few modifications. You'd have to have a video card that captures directly to MPEG-1 (like Dazzle or Broadway Pro) if you wanted to capture an hour. You are better off capturing to AVI (less than an hour), editing out the commercials, splicing the pieces back together, and then encoding to MPEG-1. 2 pass encoding gives you better video quality than capturing straight to MPEG. This will be a requirement is you want the VCD quality to be comparable to VHS. You can use Adaptec Easy CD Creator or Nero ROM Burner to burn the VCDs. I prefer the latter.

Kevin

-- kevin (kevin@kevcat.com), November 10, 2000.