Solved! Do Laser discs transfer to macs?

[mikelake1]

Hiya. Can anyone tell me the best way to digitise my laser disc collection, onto DVD or onto a mac. Is it do-able? I can easily get the sound from a laserdisc straight into Audacity, and thence to itunes if I want to, but how do I do the video signal? I'm missing something somewhere?

Thanks
mike LAke

 

[althor1138]

There are many ways to do it. I can tell you how I do it. I bought a usb capture stick from Pinnacle installed the software that came with it and ran the video and audio lines to the pinnacle stick and captured it to the computer with the software. It cost about 50 bucks at the time when I bought it. If your computer is fast enough it will capture without dropping any frames. It only captures at 720x480 but since the laserdisc is less resolution than that anyway you aren't losing any quality.

For post-processing I use avisynth and avsp to clean noise from the image, splice the side changes, and most of the time I try to restore the video to progressive frames if possible. If I were you I would capture with the composite output and not use the s-video output. The s-video output uses the filters onboard the laserdisc player and sometimes they have undesirable effects. You can clean the image in post-processing way better with software.

I've heard of people using a camcorder with dvi to capture straight to a computer. I've heard this works really good but I don't have a camcorder with dvi.