Hello everyone, A few months ago I bought this unit to start converting all my VHS and 8mm home movies to DVD. I'm happy with it. I really dig the hard drive and the FR mode. However, recently I've run into a couple of problems that I can't figure out. I'm trying to burn a football game (with implied oral consent) that looks amazing on the hd, but pretty much like crap after I burn it to DVD. On the first try I included the pre and post game show that made the running time about 5 hours. I knew I would lose quality doing it this way, but I'm ok with that.(I've burned 4 hour Simpsons DVDs that look great.) The result was unwatchable. You couldn't see the players faces at all and the field seemed to be "melting." So I immediately bagged the pre and post game and tried burning the game only again in FR mode (the run time was 2:57). The results were equally as bad. This happened once before when I was burning videos from VH1 classic from my play list. I kept these DVDs to under 2 hours and they lost a considerable amount of quality also. Am I missing something? I'm currently using Fuji DVD-Rs and I'm not using a cable box nor do I have HDTV. Thanks in advance. Chuck
I think you'll find the FR mode is a "lossey" compression. It calculates the size of the recording disk and then compresses the show to fit, hence loss of quality. VH1 was probably a normal analog broadcast. The resolution will be no better on the DVD than the source.
Try this trick, set the recording timer for the football game to two different but contiguous recording periods, 1 to 3, 3 to 5. This will give you two segments to burn under 2 hours (after deleting the crud). Then burn at max quality (SP or XP) onto two discs. For 5 hours try 3 segments. IF the edited game is less then 4 hours then use a playlist to join pieces from the recordings.