Best format to capture in?

[Twizzle]

I am capturing from my video player with the intention of backing up to CD in a VCD format. At the moment I am playing around with a Friends video which has 4 episodes per tape at about 30 min each. I want to capture them, edit out the opening credits (to reduce the size) and then burn to CD. I am not sure at this stage whether to go for 2 or 4 episodes per CD (I have seen some very watchable episodes on MPEG1 format at about 290 MB, so probably 2).

At the moment while experimenting I am capturing in MPEG2 format but I am finding that on watching back the sound seems ever so slightly out of sync. (Probably about 1/2 a second) It might just be me being picky but I do notice it on the computer monitor. I am wondering if this is just down to my capture card (a winfast A340) or if it is because my computer cant process the sound and video steams and compress on the fly? (I have an Athlon XP2200 and 512 MB RAM). My other thoughts are to capture it in an uncompressed format and then work with it from there. Obvioulsy the problems then will be the file sizes and I still don't know if there will be other problems I might run into.

[daamon]

Hi Twizzle,

Capture to uncompressed AVI for a couple of reasons:

1. Your PC (specs plenty by the way) doesn't have to encode on the fly - this can cause loss of quality and possibly sync issues. Encoding properly and to good quality is PC resource intensive (CPU and memory). This, done on the fly, has to compete with the capture process possibly causing issues.

2. Editing MPG files is notoriously fraught with dangers - Most notably audio sync issues. Womble MPEG VCR seems to be a favourite for editing with no problems.

Once you've got your AVI, use an encoder (like TMPGEnc) to encode to MPEG1 (VCD).

Also, look into VCDEasy - does VCD's and SVCD's.

Hope that helps. Good luck...

[Twizzle]

Thanks for the advice. Ill be giving it a go later on today.

[akbor75]

i would'nt capture to raw avi cos that takes lots of disk space. may be 10 GB per hour... i capture to mpeg 2, with no sync problems. before i captured to divx5 or indeo5, which was also great (i didn't have mpeg 2 then).

i noticed that my video is captured out of sync when using rew/fwd of the vcr while capturing.

[daamon]

i would'nt capture to raw avi cos that takes lots of disk space. may be 10 GB per hour...

More like 13 - 14Gb per hour (based on DV AVI) - Try it and see is the best bet. Your call Twizzle - depends on how much disk space you've got.

Either way, I'd suggest a defrag first. Capturing to a separate hard-drive could also make a difference (one installed for capture only, no operating system etc.).