video capture with asus v7700 (whats the best setup?)

[cypher007]

i have a problem, dont we all , i have the following config:
athlon 1400mhz
256mb ddram
asus v7700 deluxe
Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus (DVD hardware card)
nvidia wdm 1.08
2x ibm 40gb drives (NTFS)
winXP professional
panasonic S-VHS video deck
PAL video region (UK)

all i want to do is capture to mpeg2 in high quality, without artifacts and without interlacing, and then play it back with my hardware dvd card.

1) Asus dvcr almost does the above but it saves interlaced footage and the quality is a little vcd at times.

2) power producer by cyberlink will save deinterlaced and the quality is ok but to get it to a high enough quality i loose speed, as this seems a very slow encoder.

so to sum up is there a way to do the above either by recording to a lossless file then encoding offline, or by realtime encoding using a software combination i havent tried yet. i havent alot of exprience creating scripts so preferably a gui based solution would be nice, i also have a copy of premier 6 available.

[Gammu]

I have a simliar setup (v7700 Deluxe), except I have no DVD. So i can give you some guidelines of what I do when I capture from TV or VHS... This is what I do, I make no guarantee as whether this is best.

Important: Before you capture, stop running Smart Doctor, it can cause strange image instability.


I always capture with VirtualDub at 640x480 @ 30FPS using Pegasys PicVideo Motion JPEG Codec (NOT the loselss one) set to 18 or 19 quality. This produces rather huge files, Maybe 10 GBs per hour, but it appears lossless to me, and I if I don't shuffle windows around, I don't get more than a couple dropped frames an hour.

I am running W2K, so I don't know how the huge files will work on your system.

This MJPEG file edits like a charm in VDub (for chopping commercials and cruft).

Ok, now here's where it gets complicated... If the original source is from a FILMED movie (like a videotape/broadcast of a major motion picture) you have to deal with inverse telecine. Forgive my overly technical analysis but: Film is 24 FPS and they do all sorts of unnatural stuff to it to make it 30 PFS and just to piss me off. So when you play your capped file back, it will be jerky, esp. when the camera is movie sideways. So I use TMPEGenc's "Inverse Telecine" filter to convert it to 24 FPS. It seems to work better than VDubs. This will also get rid of interlace artifacts (and make a smaller file, because it's 24FPS instead of 30FPS).

If the original source is from video, you just use virtualdub's Smart Deinterlace filter and leave it a 30 FPS.

I also like to crop the ragged edges (which makes the final filesize smaller.) , run the VDub's Level filter (To make the blacks black and the whites white), and then I resize the cropped thing back up to 640x480.

THEN I encode into Xvid, using MP3 for sound.

THEN I use AVIinfo to fix the F'N sound because it's always out of sync...

THEN I'm so sick of looking at what Ijust endoded, I delete the damn thing. (Joking!)

Anyways... Hope this helps. I'm happy to answer any further questions you have.



And oh yes, you used to be able to get the PicVideo codec free by installing a demo of some VCR/Recorder software. The software was sort of annoying, but the Codec was installed with it. Too bad I can't think of the name of it right now, sorry.

[cypher007]

thanks for the info but

im in the UK where we use PAL 25fps how would this affect things?

[Gammu]

Re: thanks for the info but

Originally posted by cypher007
im in the UK where we use PAL 25fps how would this affect things?

I'd say you should capture at 25FPS instead of 30FPS and I suspect something is done to 24 FPS filmed movies to convert them to 25 FPS for PAL, but I don't know what.

If you step through your captured movie frame-by-frame, and there are duplicate frames in a pattern (something like every fifth and sixth frame is identical), then it's probably related to PAL's version of telecineing. So if you get jerky video, at least you know what's causing it, and it's not a codec/hardware issue.

I'd say everything else I said should work for you.


--Gammu

[khp]

24 fps film to 25 fps Pal conversion, is simply done by speeding up both audio and video.