OKAY! Thanks to Tony and the guys at Videotec my Pioneer CLD1450 is now outputting pure NTSC 3.53. I captured some Hoth footage from Episode V last night with Microsoft's NTSC DV codec. Works fine. Might look at some quality issues though! Encoded the video (audio is another ball game with this project which I will look at soon) with CCE 2.50 SP using a 5 pass variable bit rate of 9000, lower field first, progressive encoding (changed the frame rate to 24fps using VirtualDub 1.47 and frameserved to CCE) and the results.......looked awful. I've made better VCD's. So after tearing my hair out for hours I decided to look at the problem from a VCD point of view....and deinterlaced using VirtualDub's Blend Field filter. The results were 1000% better. I'll post a screen grab later to show you. I want to keep the use of filters to a bare minimum but if anyone can think of a way of improving the picture quality...?

The Ewok Adventure disc is fine. Seems my lens and sensors inside my machine were dusty and the lens wasn't focusing on the disc correctly. There's another movie for transferring. Now, if I can only find a copy of Battle Of Endor on LD. By the way I just lost an eBay auction for the Japanese box set of Indiana Jones including documentaries. Anyone know where I can get another.

The Star Wars Trilogy CD Set of the radio show has been sold as you can see on the right. The limited edition SW & Empire is still available. It's a nice set and has been long out of print.

More later!!

I think this means I'm getting somewhere!