Capture Quality

[flyman]

I recently purcheased a Sony Vaio RS430G with Giga-Pocket. I am using it to capture analog home video from a Hi-8 camcorder.

I purchases a copy of Pinnacle Studio 8 but returned it because I could not get it to recognize the Giga-Pocket hardware. I dowloaded an evaluation copy of ULead from the internet. Same result. I tried Windows Movie Maker that was bundled with the PC. Same result. It seems that the only capture software that can see the hardware is the Click To DVD applicaiton that came with the PC.

Click to DVD captures to MPEG. Click to DVD has two "Quality" settings "High" and "Standard". On the standard setting, most video captured is equivalent to the source video. The problem is that video with a lot of action in it pixelates for a lack of a better term. Everything breaks up into blocks. The effect is slight and barely noticable. When I try to capture in High quality there is a slight improvement in the high action shots but not significant. The problem is that the resultant MPEG baloons up to 7Gig from 3.5 when I go from standard to high and I can't master the video onto a single DVD.

I need to transfer about 250 hours of home movies to DVD. I want to capture all of the video and then come back at a later date and edit/master. I don't want to spend a lot of time or additional money doing this. I have two questions:

1). Is there something cheap, simple, not time consuming and sure to work that I can do to optimize my video capture or should I be satisfied with the relatively good results that I am getting with Click to DVD? Please keep in mind that I have little experience with computer hardware.

2). Is my plan to capture now and edit later advisable? Will I be able to edit the MPEGs from Click to DVD with other third party software?

I appreciate any help that anyone can offer. Please dumb it down for me so that I can understand. Thanks.

[FOO]

No way in hell you're going to get 250 hours of home movie on
a computer at once in reasonable quality.

MPEG is hard to edit unless you re-encode it. Even with a very fast computer
it will take more than 250 hours to do that. That's on top of the
250 hours to capture it. You are probably looking at 1000 hours
not ncluding editing.

[flyman]

I have heard that there are multiple codex (spelling) that can be used when capturing to MPEG. They result in different quality for different subject matter. Can anyone provide more info on that. And if such a thing could help me with my prior stated problem? If so, how do you implement them?

Thanks

[sacajaweeda]

You're going to have a lot of fun, I just know it.

[You_Are_Alive]

Well, after looking and hunting down information that you have not provided, I think the reason you have no luck with any of the software you tried to edit with is because this is "proprietary technology" like Tivo and others.

From my research, the Gigapocket is "software" that records to HDD, is this what you have? http://www.vaio.net/sonyvaio662.html Disregard model, just look at the software, is it the same?

If yes, forget installing different codecs, will not help you. Try this, is it possible at all to change the capture settings from mpeg to avi? If yes, then thats the easiest and least expensive way to re-edit with one of the other programs cause they will be able to read the avi, which hopefully is uncompressed avi. Or if you already have Click to DVD, use it to re-edit.

If you are dissatisfied with quality, then as others have stated, you are in for a rude awakening. No way is it gonna be fast and not cost more money. You are also hindered by the fact that you admit that you don't have much experience. So I will stop here before I offer another suggestion because you may not understand and I have already spent too much time writing this response up. Maybe knowing this now, the quality and editing won't matter much anymore. good luck.