Fast Single Frame Capture Hardware

[13Beast REW]

I use my video capture hardware for taking hi-res screenshots from video games quite often, however, I need better a better capture card to keep from getting shots where scanlines are visible. Right now I'm working with a PS2 so the best capture interface I really need is s-video. I'm considering just sticking with buying an ATI Wonder TV since even though its old it has fairly good reviews (plus its cheap as dirt). Can anyone recommend a better capture card?


These are the kind of shots I DONT want...

[Comberman]

Any of the ATI 9000 series Radeon AiW cards should give you good s-vhs output as will the nvidea VIVO series. To remove some of the banding (background in your pic) try capturing at the highest resolution you card will permit and then down-sizing. To get rid of the scan lines you need to de-interlace the image. Photoshop has such a filter but you could try other image processing software to see if they include such a de-interlacing feature. Single frame capture is a bit of a hit and miss thing because it depends very much on the speed of throughput (video card to processor to ram, etc), bit-rates and the speed of movement of the image in each frame action sequence. One way to get reasonably good images from video is not to capture a frame but a clip. If you can capture a short clip at a very high resolution (720xnnn) at the highest frame/bit-rate possible you can use an editor (I use Premiere but you could use VDub) to cut out the frame you need (the one which best represents the still image with little or no interlace visible - it is possible. Whatever video card you do choose to purchase, it will more than likely come with bundled software that will provide you video editing software.

[13Beast REW]

I went and bought an AiW 9000 and it works exactly how I want it to. Thanks

[Comberman]

No problem. Glad you got things sorted out.
Cheers!