pausing the recording?

[Mark]

Perhaps a dumb question, or I'm just doing something wrong with the interface of recoder.

Is it possible to pause and unpause the recorder without it opening a new file? I want to bleep out the commercials without having to do the whole editting thing.

[dkardatzke]

Pausing a recording only pauses the viewing stream, it does not break up the file that's being recorded to remove commercials. If you want to edit commercials you will have to use a third-party MPEG editing program.

[Mark]

I am surprised you can't just stuff in an I-frame and then pause, and do the same at the unpause.

My wife has a huge pile of VCR tapes sh wants to digitize. This is going to make the job very long. Doing this with a box connected to the TV is going to be difficult. The 3-rd party editing systems are quite painful to use and produce degraded content. I can hear her screams now.

[anubis341]

I'm doing the same thing for my wife ;-)

I capture the mpeg with Sage Recorder, author it with Ulead DVD movie factory, open it in DVDShrink, re-author removing the commercials and then burn it with Prassi Primo DVD.

I've converted approx 20 X 8 hour VHS tapes so far and have never had any issues with degraded quality or a/v sync. In fact, the quality is slightly better as any noise introduced by the VCR seems to be filtered out during the on-card encoding stage.

It works for me and keeps my wife very happy!

[Mark]

Thanks for the instructions! I guess I'm used to the professional end of things for decoding and encoding; I never thought this was a difficult issue. I just don't think I should have to set up an Avid station in my living room in order for my wife to bleep out commercials.
I do own a copy of Ulead, so I'll set it up and see how it all works out.