Need help finding a good video capture app

[typhon]

Hey everyone
I have an nVidia Geforce4 card with TV-in, and I'm now in the process of 'digitalizing' all my old camcorder tapes...
My problem is that I can't find a good application for capturing the video to disk in a sensible way.
I've tried various methods...
1. capturing directly to disc via some processor-intensive codec like divx, xvid... this doesn't seem to work very well, even though I have a reasonably fast computer (athlon xp 2200+)
using virtualdub's capture feature for this
2. capturing directly to disk, uncompressed. this is madness, and no alternative since it consumes crazy amounts of diskspace.
using adobe premiere for this
3. capturing to mpeg2 via intervideo winproducer... this is my best solution so far... but the mpeg2-encoder built into the program seems to suck (quality low), and I can't find any way to alter the pre-defined quality settings of winproducer.
4. windows movie maker... no!

It's madness... I'm sure there are better applications around, and better codecs maybe... I'm just new to this.
Can someone give me a hint on what to try? I'm trying to capture at just below dvd-resolution by the way... say 640x480

/Erik

[setarip]

By all means, use VirtualDub - witha lossless video codec, such as HuffyUV...

[sneglen]

I would Also recommend VirtualDub.

If you use a lossless codec like HuffyUV it will still use ALOT of space, my suggestion is:

Use VirtualDub and DivX codec, but only capture in 384X576 (If in Europe) or 384X480 (If in America). if you are capturing from a Video Camcorde the reduce in vertical rows of pixels will not matter, since the Analog signal is pretty poor if you compare it to a digital signal, and the capture will not use so much power from your CPU in smalle resolutions, the only thing importent is to pick the crrect height. I have captured full movies this way with the bitrate of 5000 or so and the 2 hour movie is just about 4-5gigs big. Whereas a movie in that lenght will be huge perhaps 50 gigs in Uncompressed or even more.

My system is:
AMD Thunderbird 1333Mhz
512 MB Ram


You will see that this will result in something just as good as the solution proposed by Setarip.

but only if your using an analog camcorder, if you are using a Digital one, don't do this since you will lose resolution.