Canopus ADVC1394

[vermilion]

I'm thinking of getting the Canopus ADVC1394 capture card to capture my VHS tapes for dvd burning, but before I do it I need to know a few things. I already have a capture card, the winfast TV2000XP Deluxe.


1. If I use this card to capture my videos will the output look any better then it would with the capture card I already have?

2. If I captured to DV and rencoded the video to MPEG-2, would the video look better then it would if I would of just captured to MPEG-2?

3. Will TMPGEnc let you encode a DV to MPEG-2? I don't like to use any other program for encoding.

[erratic]

1. Maybe, but not necessarily. However, the advantage of a DV converter is that the aspect ratio will be correct. It's not always easy to get the aspect ratio correct with an analog capture card.

2. Yes, especially if you use noise reduction filters to clean up some VHS noise before encoding to MPEG-2.

3. Yes, but you may have to give the DirectShow Multimedia File Reader the highest priority. Option -> Environmental setting. Select the VFAPI plug-in tab. Right click on the Directshow Reader and select higher priority until it tops the list. Click OK.

[redwudz]

I use a ADVC-100 to download DV-2. TMPGEnc has no problem accepting it. However, if you are capturing VHS tape, you might want to run the DV through Virtualdub (With a DV codec installed) to clean up the VHS noise. TMPGEnc also has a noise filter that works well. Noise filtering helps quite a bit with VHS captures, but may take a lot of time, depending on your VHS quality and how particular you are. I encode seperate streams (ES), audio to MP2, and feed it to TMPGEnc Author, which can also burn DVD's. AC3 audio is better, but it's another step