Video copying to DVD almost defeated me

Copying VHS (or other video tape formats, eg 8mm) is not as easy as they make out, especially if you want to edit the results. This is the story of a copying process that almost defeated me.
Back in 1957, I sang on the soundtrack of a film of the first UK anti-nuclear march to the Aldermaston atomic weapons establishment. Although it was anonymous, it was actually the first film of Lindsay Anderson, who later went on to make such masterpieces of cinema as This Sporting Life, If..., O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital.
The song was my own Doomsday Blues, to the tune of St James Infirmary. My guitar-playing was never good enough for the blues, so I asked my friend Leon Rosselson to accompany me when I went to the National Film Theatre on London’s South Bank where Anderson recorded us.
Lately I’ve been curating a programme of music films at the National Media Museum in Bradford to celebrate my half-century in music, and rather wanted to include a clip from the movie in the final show on September 15. I have a rather poor time-coded VHS copy of the film. To my amazement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament doesn’t have a copy. The British Film Institute does, but there are no facilities for anyone but recognised distributors or cinemas to hire it. (That wasn’t a problem when I toured Germany singing to peace groups in the late 1950s, cos I took a 16mm copy with me).
Obviously, I’d have to try to do something with my VHS copy. That’s when my trouble started.
My LG DVD recorder is hooked up to my VHS machine (also to a 8mm camcorder, and even a Betamax machine), and it’s pretty easy to copy back and forth between them. I decided (fool!) to copy straight to DVD+R, so I could then put it into my laptop and edit the clip I wanted. (I tend to use DVD+R as standard, cos it makes Macs happier, despite my dislike of Steve Jobs' baby.) The copy proceeded without problems, but when I put the disk in my PC it couldn’t recognise it. It played fine in the DVD recorder, so I knew the data was there.
The DVD recorder has a hard disk, plus the option to copy from DVD disk to internal drive, and vice versa, so I copied the movie on to the hard disk. Then, I copied it back on to a DVD-R disk (NOT DVD+R) to see if that could be seen when I put it into my PC. That worked fine, and the DVD played OK in Windows Media Player.
Almost home and dry I thought, but when I imported the VOB file from the DVD into Sony Vegas (my preferred editing software) I could see the images, but there was no sound. This is apparently something to do with the file needing to be de-muxed, which separates the sound and video streams, but I didn’t want to get into all that.
No problem, I thought. I’ve got a brilliant program called MovAVI Video Converter, which I use mainly for converting Flash video FLV files I’ve downloaded from the Internet into an editable form. I knew that would also work on VOB files – but not in this case. It reported errors, and abandoned the task.
Another brilliant program, Magic DVD Copier, which I use for moving my own DVD disks on to my local hard disk, would take the VOB files from the DVD and place them on my internal drive. That worked, but MovAVI didn’t like them either.
Because I’m currently evaluating video editing software, I have a number of the most popular programs under review. I decided to see what Nero 7 Premium’s Vision Express module could do with the problem files.
It imported them without problems, and I was able to export the result to an AVI file, which I could import into Vegas, with both sound and vision placed on the tracks in editable form.
Home and dry? Not quite.
The entire soundtrack was afflicted with a terrible crackle.
Now I also have Sony’s audio companion to Vegas, Sound Forge, on my system, and Vegas has an “edit in Sound Forge” option. The problem is that Sound Forge requires an external plug-in for noise reduction, which I didn’t have.
But because the radio station for which I do a lot of work uses Cool Edit for its audio editing, I also have that on my system, and Cool Edit has built-in noise reduction. So I extracted the audio soundtrack in Sound Forge and saved it to an MP3 file, which I then imported into Cool Edit.
Now, true Dolby-style noise reduction is something you apply during principal recording. Any sound twitching you apply afterwards will affect everything else within the frequency range of the noise your reducing.
It worked, however. Leon’s guitar sounded a bit weird, but the surprisingly youthful voice (I was about 26 at the time) was just about acceptable.
Now have you spotted a possible new problem when I imported the noise-reduced file back into Vegas? Yes, right. By separating the soundtrack from the video, I’d have lost any lip-sync. Fortunately, as it happened, my song was “wild”, in other words it was background music to people marching, crowds watching and applauding, etc.
I killed the audio track that was synchronised to the actual movie, and replaced it with the song. The video was still time-coded, so I used the Vegas “pan and crop” facility to exclude the time code. This could have meant that, since Vegas crops in all dimensions, that people’s heads were cropped out of shot, but in this case that wasn’t an issue.
I selected the appropriate sequence, and rendered it to an AVI file.
So here was a 50-year-old blast from my past, ready to be shown on the Media Museum’s screen.
Unfortunately, the process had taken so long, there was no longer any room in the programme for it! Oh, well, it’s one for the archive anyway.
The products I used were
• MovAVI Converter (http://movavi.com/videoconverter/download.html)
• Magic DVD Copier (http://dl.magicdvdripper.com/MagicDVDCopier46.exe)
• Nero 7 Premium (http://www.nero.com/nero7/eng/nero7-up.php#)
• Sony Vegas (http://sony-vegas-video.en.softonic.com/download) This is actually a free evaluation of the latest version, though I used the older Vegas 5, which still works fine for me.
• Cool Edit has been bought by Adobe and “developed” as Audition. I never actually liked Cool Edit much, and Audition has too cluttered a design for my taste (a fault common to a number of the latest versions of Adobe software, which is why I’m still using Pagemaker). To download an evaluation you’ll need to set up a free ID. Go to http://www.adobe.com for details.