Best settings to capture for DVD conversion? (1 Viewer)

[John_Berger]

Okay, I'm really getting annoyed here.
I'm trying to convert some of my VHS tapes to DVD, partuclarly those tapes that are not expected to be out on DVD for a long time if at all. Unfortunately, the stair-stepping on any slightly angled surfaces is horrendous. I've heard that stair-stepping will happen because an interlaced image is being displayed on a non-interlacing monitor. Where I have a problem with this is that the image on the screen WHILE capturing is gorgeous (as gorgeous as VHS can be anyway). However, as soon as I play it back on the screen the stair-stepping even in low-contrast areas makes in almost unwatchable.
I've been trying to play with MSP 6.5's video capture options, and my only two options for the raw capture format are uncompressed AVI (about 1.1 GB/minute, which is unacceptable) or MPEG-2. (Once the capture is finished I can save the file in whatever format I want, including compressed AVI, but the actual capture itself can only be uncompressed AVI or MPEG-2 from what I can tell.)
So, I've been capturing in MPEG-2 with field order A at a video bit rate of 14,000. My field options are progressive frames, field order A, and field order B. I also have several other capture options available. To help in this, I have all of my current settings listed in the screen shot below.

What kind of settings should these be set to for the best quality capture with no or minimal stair-stepping? BTW, my capture card is the ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500.
I will also say that I am not against using another product for capturing, but I will be using MSP 6.5 for editing and the final DVD-ready rendering. Are there any programs (even Premiere) that can capture and compress AVI in the various codecs on-the-fly and then write the capture file? I'll be glad to do it that way if I need to. My priority right now is getting rid of the stair-stepping since that's the only consistent problem that I've been having.
Jeff! Someone! Help!
UPDATE: As per the Help file, I also tried setting the GOP count to 4 and headers to 1 with no discernable effect.

 

[Ken Chan]

the stair-stepping on any slightly angled surfaces is horrendous. I've heard that stair-stepping will happen because an interlaced image is being displayed on a non-interlacing monitor.

Not necessarily. It's most noticeable if the player is doing bad bob (single-field interpolation) deinterlacing, as shown in the center picture here. To check, you might be able to force the player to do a weave instead of bob, and look at a scene with no motion. In that case, interlaced vs. progressive won't matter.
The settings you're fiddling with probably don't have any effect on what you're seeing. Bad MPEG makes things look blocky and smudgy over the entire picture, and especially in areas with motion.
Does playback of uncompressed AVI look the same? What if you encode the AVI into MPEG?
//Ken

 

[John_Berger]

Quote:

I've been trying some AVI settings and although there is no stair-stepping, there is a very bad solarization effect on similar, contiguous color shades, like on a blackboard or other solid color that has shading to it. It looks absolutely terrible when it's there and is just as distracting as stair-stepping.
I'm going to play around some more tonight. Based on what I saw last night, the situation looks very promising, but we'll see what happens when I convert those captures from a progressive raw MPEG-2 file to a field order A DVD-ready file. For all I know, the nasty stairs will return, although I doubt it.

 

[John_Berger]

Okay. After some testing, the upgrade to the Ulead.NOW codec produced a much better picture with no stair-stepping; however, I did notice one problem. If I can eliminate this, I think I'll actually be a happy camper.

The capture images by default are progressive. When I convert them to a DVD-read format, any parts of the screen with movement have severe combing. Movement is very, very jittery and not smooth at all. Severe movement will show combing effects, identical to what is specified in the link that Ken has above. Will captuing in Field Order A instead of Progressive get rid (or reduce) this problem?