[Darren Blake]

..but maybe its something i have done.


I captured a 90 minute documentary off Sky through my analogue capture card after video taping it. Due to limitations of my PC I had to capture at half res and compress using HUFFYUV. I had been told from another learned source that this would nto matter since the resolution would be lost in the transcoding to MPEG2, and HUFFYUV is a lossless compressor anyway.

I edited out the adverts and re-synched the audio (0.4second error for some reason) using Puremotion Editstudio and wrote the file out again as a DV AVI at full res. Not sure whether this was a good move or not. Even at this stage the edges of subtitles and screen captions were getting very blurred. I then read this into Vision Express 3 from the demo version of Nero 6.6 to author the DVD with a menu, etc.

The result was appalling. I have seen some blocky DVDs but this took the cake. I've seen two films crunched down ti fit on a single layer DVD-R and the level of compression artifacts was not as bast as what Nero created. Also, to my annoyance, it seems to have messed up the lip synching again. The sound leads the picture by a small amount. Whether this is a throwback from the original capture I do not know.

My questions are:

1) Did I hamstring myself before I started by capturing at a low res? If so then I'm going to have to spend some serious money to get around this because my machine is no where near fast enough t capture at full res and compres in real time.
2) What caused the lip synch error during capture? THis is just an annoyance because it was fixable but it woud be nice to know what caused it.
3) What on earth has NEro VE done to my AVI to make it look so bad?
4) WHat has it done to re-introduce the lip synching error?


Finally, I'd welcome views on using Nero VE as a DVD authoring tool. I've seen some good reviews of it but also some very bad ones - a lot about picture quality from the final MPEG2.

Thanks in advance.