A Couple of Noob Questions

[Panama]

I am completely new to capturing and have been reading this and similiar sites for about a week now and think I have the jist of most concepts, but I still have a few unanswered questions:

1. If capturing NCTS TV signal, why would someone want to set the capture resolution to higher than TV resolution or the frame rates to higher than the TV frame rate??
To put this another way, is capturing a TV signal at DVD quality resolutions and FPS any higher quality (or more useful) than just capturing the signal at TV resolutions and FPS??

2. When determining the most appropriate capture resolution and frame rate, does having digital cable affect those decisions? How does one determine these settings?

3. Say, for example, that I want to preserve my favorite episode of my favorite show (from a digital TV signal) for sobriety sakes. I assume that, in order to take advantage of future technologies, the best way to store that episode would be in uncompressed AVI/PCM format. Is this a correct assumption (I was basing that on the fact that all MPEG codecs are lossy and that uncompressed avi isnt?)? Now, it seems that an hour long show using a non-compression format would take upwards of 75 Gigs. Is that a fair estimate? Finally, my goal would be to take that episode (editing out the commercials); and using a loseless compression scheme like ace or zip, compress the file for future use (for instance, when DVD writing becomes viable)?? Is this a viable option? How well would 75 Gigs of uncompressed avi compress and span across CD-Rs?

4. Basically, my goal would be to preserve my favorite TV show(s) in two formats: raw (or as close to plain raw data as possible...raw may not be the right term...I want to preserve as much quality as possible for future use) and in SVCD or DiVX (to be determined later). If storage and hard-drive space wasn't an issue, how would you go about preserving you favorite episodes? What type of card would work best for this kind of process?

[dilorc]

To put this in the proper perspective, I have been capturing and creating VCD's for about 6 months now. I'm no expert, but I have been doing exactly what you are describing.

1. For NTSC, you want to capture at 29.97 FPS. Most DVD's actually have a lower frame rate of 23.973 or something like that because they are made directly from films which are shot at 24 FPS. Some TV episodes are shot at 24 FPS then "telecined" to 30 FPS. Anyway, you need to capture at 29.97 FPS. As for the resolution, that is an area of debate. For VCDs the standard is 352x240 (for NTSC). SVCDs are 480x480. Some people will tell you that if you are making a VCD, there is no need to capture at a higher resolution than 352x480. Some people will tell you that you need to capture at 640x480 or 720x480 for the best results. Some people say that this is overkill, since you are going to have to resize to 352x240 anyway. Personally, I found that capturing at 720x480 yields the best results.

2. I record off digital cable. Actually, I record off a Tivo connected to digital cable. The resolution and FPS doesn't depend on the source. What filters you decide to add (i.e. smoothing or noise reduction) is depenent on the source.

3. I think you may be stuck here. Your 75 Gig estimate is right, after you edit out the commericals (720*480*3*30 FPS*43 min*60 sec)=74.7 Gig. However, unless you are going to pause and restart the capture duiring the commericals you will need to capture the entire hour which will be 104 Gig. Once you edit it, you'll need to save the new file, for a total of 179 gig of hard drive space. You can capture using a lossless codec like huffyuv (seach the forum for where to download it). This will give you about a 3:1 compression ratio. To get down to a managable size, you'll need to lower the resoultion or use a compression codec. I think you'll be looking at like 32 800Mb CDR's per episode otherwise.

4. If your thinking of making DVD's later, I would just make mpeg2's that can be written to DVD's when the time comes. As for a capture card, I will defer to others on this board. I use the Dazzle Hollywood DV bridge. It's OK, but I think there are better and cheaper soultions that may work for you.