Video Capture from VHS

[kimomakano]

I am trying to figure out the best way to capture VHS tape into DVD format. I am using an ATI 128 Pro card and have an HP DVD200i burner. My pc is 1.1 gig processor and I have a 40gig hard drive dedicated for videos.
Right now I have having difficulty getting the product to be clean, sometimes it is jerky and sometimes it misses chunks of frames.
All I want to know is what should I set the settings for to get the best results? The documentation that came with the card and drive are almost usless.
Are there any good manuals out there that teach a novice how to do this? I am not into this commercially, just want to back up my personal movies.
Thanks

[setarip]

Try using Virtula Dub's builtin capture software. Set both video and audio to uncompressed (You can compress to DivX video and .MP3 audio AFTER capturing.) to avoid dropped frames, etc.

[thee]

same problem

I was trying to do the same thing on the same set up, but i couldn't capture 720x480 in full mpeg2 quality. ATI cards say they are for capturing mpeg2 but they are bending the truth cause it's not true mpeg2 and they don't seem to care. anyways...i finally got my computer to capture and keep in sync perfect mpeg2 quality video.
I had a 1.1G T-bird athlon AMDon a a7v133, ATI Allinwonder Rage, pc133 256megs, 40G 7200RPM Western Digital harddrive

i now use a AMD 1800+ XP, ATI AIW Radeon 64DV, asus a7v333 w/ 333 DDR ram 256megs, and a 120G 7200 8Meg buffer Western digital HD.
and things are fine now, but i use ulead DVD factory to do my capturing and TMPEnc to do my trimming and converting.

of course "professionals" use better hardware, but their cards cost about $1000 just for the cheapies.

but no problems with ATI here now. but it did take a few weeks to finally figure it all out!

oh yeah...i was running windows 2000 pro which would be alot better than win98. you need something that handles NTFS

[kimomakano]

Thanks for the feedback. So then you do not use the ATI capture applications? I would also be curious as to the settings you used for "capture settings". Such as; Bit Rate, Motion Estimation Quality, Frames (I or P, B), Interlacing or Deinterlacing.
Thanks again

[thee]

ATI

no i don't use the ATI tools at all. the TV thing won't capture audio at 48KHZ which is sometimes necessary (if you're going to use DVDit which is crap software) i use ulead dvdmovie factory to caputer, TMPGEnc to modify mpgs and dvdit to build my menus/dvd files. i tried out uleads expensive DVD software (there are 2) and i liked it better than DVDit, but it's too expensive for me to buy!
depending on how long the video is the bit rate can vary. figuring out what works good is probably the best bet as everyone will tell you their settings are the best.
my default settings for capture of a 90 min clip is 720x480 29.97 fps, 48KHZ 224 stereo audio, 4 Pframes 2 B, closed GOP - 1, progressive frames (use field A if you plan to reprocess the whole clip, but when you do the reprocessing you should use field B in the second process) and 5000bps of CBR. most people will tell you to go VBR cause it is better, but CBR is just my personal choice! it will take you a few weeks to get everything situated and figured out!