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Results OK Ian. The black bars don't take anything away from the movie. The DVD I have produced is standard size using "Smartfit" option of the burner. I will try one now with the output set to High Quality on a double layer DVD and see if it looks better. regards Tony

I think I've got there Ian - the mpg is rendering at the moment. I did a series of experimental clips with different settings. I think that interlacing was certainly part (if not all) of the problem. The video is 4:3 aspect ratio, but somehow I had got the project setting as 16:9 in the video editor. Having changed that back to 4:3 I managed to produce relatively video. I also had the interlacing setting to "interlaced, top field first" which I think may have been wrong because when I use the detect interlacing setting in the video editor, it sets that value to "interlaced, bottom field first". To be honest, I tried both settings in my experiments and couldn't see much difference. I then had to get rid of the nasty line near the bottom, so looked on videohelp and found a suggestion there which was to make a full frame mask with a transparent centre and black bars top and bottom to just hide the video interference. I did that by making a .png file in photoshop and then adding that to the effects track in the video editor. This looks OK and hopefully the final DVD will be fine. I really appreciate your help here...I was tearing my hair out... regards, Tony

Ian, Thanks for the quick reply...I wondered about interlacing. The problem I have got here is that there is a "video line" in the captured AVI file (20 gb) - see snapshot attached. I really want to get rid of that. The mpeg file(s) I produced in powerdirector did get rid of this line. The original aspect ratio is 4:3. I used a setting in powerdirector which is "use CLVP to stretch clip to 16:9 aspect ratio" which produces an mpeg2 file without the "video line" (see snapshot 2) and reasonable proportionality for viewing. Maybe this was the wrong thing to do...?? Anyway, I will use the method you have suggested, but I need to get rid of that "video line" before I do it.....Any suggestions? It may be OK to crop as it is near the bottom of the frame, but I don't think I can do that in my version of powerdirector (Ver 7). thanks again, Tony

I am having a problem getting a good DVD burned ..... I have digitised a movie by running a VHS tape through my digital camcorder to my PC using the A/V passthrough mode in the camcorder. (I have done this successfully several times before). This has produced an AVI file on the PC which is about 20 GB in size and is perfectly watchable. I have tried several ways to produce a DVD from this but none have worked so far. I use Cyberlink Powerdirector to edit video and have just trimmed the AVI file, taking the surplus bits from the start and end of the movie. Then produced an MPEG2 file using the Produce function of the software (actually 2 mpeg files - 1 of High quality (5.5 GB which I use double layer DVDs to write to) and 1 of standard quality (2.75 gb)) ready for DVD production. Both of the mpeg files view OK - I use XBMC (modified Xbox) to view MPegs on TV and video and sound quality is OK (i.e. VHS quality, but watchable). The problem is wh I form a DVD image and burn to DVD the picture is poor quality i.e. on any panning shot, the images appear with jagged edges (or wavy lines - I don't know how best to describe it...). I have tried several different software packages, including IMGburn (Powerdirector, Ashampoo, Windows DVD maker). I am running on a Windows 7 system. I am outputting a PAL DVD and have checked all settings that I can think of. Can anyone give me any pointers or suggestions of what I may be doing wrong? many thanks in advance of help