Recent DVD recorder stuff

I've begun backing up my VHS subtitled tapes of Ranma 1/2 to DVD with my
Maggie. I've been using the 2 hour mode and the results so far are
impressive and acceptable. The resulting video is not grainy like Viz's
DVDs they made from their material. And I'm able to squeeze 5 episodes
on each disk with about 9 minutes left over. I'll need about 33 or so
disks just for the TV series alone.

I also did something last night that I shouldn't have - I was up until
almost 3 am recording the Star Wars Holiday Special on a DVD, utilizing
the video fixing capabilities of the Magnavox MWR10D6, from a tape a
friend did for me that I had not realized he did until I found it again.

I'd say the result was 90 to 95% fixed. The picture doesn't suffer from
the odd bending due to the speed fluctuation of the Betamax source
produced during recording and showing up during playback. It looks like
the show was taped in its entirety and possibly edited to another tape
later, because how are you going to know when they're going to run a
Star Wars toy commercial just by pausing out the commercials during the
broadcast anyway? It was shown only once!

Also mostly resolved was the odd off-coloring of the video. I had done
some pages for a friend with some Snappy captures which I adjusted the
color using Paint Shop Pro 4 on a Win95 laptop. Most of those were
fixed, but some were unable to be color corrected. It seems my Maggie
recorder can fix incorrect colors up to a point. Instead of overly green
hues, it came out with more browns and yellows instead, but you get the
idea it's more like how it should look.

I also added chapter marks in places so that you could skip the
ridiculous songs if you wanted to. Those probably won't make it into a
processed copy of the disk unless there's a way to rip, edit, and then
burn that.

I was very surprised by how much the video was corrected and realized
the limitations how much it was able to be restored, but the result I
got is pretty good, and the only other way to get it any better is to
get a DVD recording off the original tape which isn't going to happen.

I wonder if Sean Kelly knows about the video restoration capabilities of
the MWR10D6 recorder? He's got loads of video game commercials on other
people's Betamax tapes (collected through discovery at thrift stores
from what I remember hearing) that need help.