Okay, here’s the deal. I have an hourlong Betacam master tape of my video magnum opus (a documentary). I want to transfer it to a DVD to serve as a master DVD. From this master DVD I want to create VHS & DVD dubs.
The edit house can create my DVD master in two ways:
A. As a straight-transfer which is less expensive, will not contain cue points and will only play on DVD players (not computers), or
B. As an authored (encoded) transfer which is more expensive, can contain cue points and will play on all players.
Now, cue points and computer-playability are nice, but they aren’t too important to me. What is important to me is the ability to make VHS and DVD dubs from this master.
Questions:
If I bought a consumer-quality DVD player and hooked it up to a consumer-quality VHS deck with, say, RCA cables, could I crank out VHS dubs of my master DVD no sweat? Would it matter if the master DVD was a straight-transfer DVD or an authored DVD?
If I also wanted to crank out DVD dubs of my DVD master, what equipment would I need and how would I go about doing that? And again, would it matter if the master DVD was a straight-transfer DVD or an authored DVD?
Thanks in advance for your answers (and any other advice you might want to share).
Consider getting an S-VHS deck to make your VHS tapes. Even when using standard tape you’ll get a better transfer connecting with an S-video cable to your DVD source. JVC has some modestly priced decks that even record S-VHS on standard tape.
Point 2. Probably the simplest way is to invest in a consumer DVD recorder - especially if you can get ‘firewire’ connections on both your player and recorder (they’ll be available soon, if not then go for an S -Video connection as above). Simply hook up the player to the recorder and make your own copies on DVD-R or DVD+R.
Depends on how many copies you want but with DVD recorders still being fairly pricey it’ll still be cheaper to get a commercial outfit to copy them from your master.
There is also the PC DVD burner option which then means you have to go for the more expensive option.
I’m not to sure how macrovision is used in dvd players - does it have to be “activated” on the dvd disk or will it be applied to even homemade disks? if the latter you will either have to have the dvd modded or buy a special cable, before you can transfer to a VCR from it.
You can tell the edit house not to enable Macrovision on your DVD; it’s a flag they can set in their build process. Then you can record VHS copies straight from the DVD player. When you get a DVD-R/RW or DVD+RW, you can just duplicate the entire contents of the DVD on to new copies without any problems.
From my experience vhs to dvd doesn’t look much better than vcd. I use a panasonic dvd recorder e30, these are expensive, but the vhs/beta to dvd quality is the best, looks slightly better than the original.
You might find it more practical to have an internet company transfer it for you as you only have one video to do.