ReplayTV video editing.

I'm finally getting back around to trying to archive my videos from my ReplayTV 5040. I'm making some progress. Maybe someone who's been having similar problems will come across this post... it may help.

Here's what I've been doing:
1) Transferred files off the replayTV using DVArchive

2) Since TMPGEnc won't read my mpg files, I have to open them first using DVD2AVI. Choose Save Project (F4) from the file menu. It will generate two files, an .mpa file (mpeg audio) and a .d2v file (dvd2avi file associated with mpeg video).

3) Open TMPGEnc and go to file, then open the project window (or just press CTRL+W). Choose DVD-NTSC (assuming you're in the US and you want to convert to DVD format). This will prompt you to input your video file (the .d2v file), and the audio file (.mpa) from the previous step. Click next when this has been done.

4) You have a few different options... cutting out commercials using the source range, cropping the image (clip video frame), and reducing noise. If the video was recorded at medium quality or higher, I usually use TMPGEnc's source selection to cut out commercials manually. **This is because with medium quality and high quality recordings, I usually don't have a problem with synching audio and video... with low quality, it's almost a guarantee that that will happen**. If it's low quality, I would have opened the file in womble's mpeg2vcr and taken the commercials out first.

5)Click next, choose your settings. The smaller the bitrate of the video, the poorer the quality of the video. Choose the rest of the settings for audio and video and click next (defaults will work fine).

6) Choose your output video's filename and click "Start Encoding Immediately" to start encoding. If you want to encode multiple videos at once, click the batch option and repeat the process. When you've finished all the video settings, click "Start Encoding Immediately" and hit ok. The encoder will encode all the videos you've queued up.

The only problem I've had after doing this involves having the video and audio out of sync. The audio is out of sync for the length of the movie by the same amount of time... meaning that the sync problems don't get worse or better towards the end of the movie.

When this happens, I open up Womble and demux the audio into two parts. I set an audio offset according to my own judgement of how far off the audio is. For instance, if it appears that the audio is going ahead of the video by about half a second, I'd adjust the offset to positive 500 msec (.500 seconds). This will move the audio up a half second. Remux the audio and video and check the resulting video (don't close womble until you're sure you've got it right though). Keep adjusting this way until the problem is fixed.

Now, I've got most of my mpeg2 files. They're commercial free, and after a little work, the low quality recordings are synched up. Now I've just gotta slap a few in the TMPGEnc DVD Authoring program (or another one if I find it has more options), and burn a test DVD. The rest should be easy compared to getting the videos to DVD format.