Newbie question about capture quality

[ethvia]

phew...my 3 days are over and I've looked alot for this subject but couldn't find much....

I am converting my old VHS-C tapes to DVD. I am playing them through a VCR and running the RCA jacks to my internal capture card. They look terrific on the old tape when played on the TV but look really bad captured/burned onto a DVD and played on the same TV.

I am capturing them at the highest resolution my card supports which is 740x450 (something like that). My system is a P4 1.5ghz with 512 megs of RAM, if it's important my video card is a GeForceFX5200 with 128meg RAM. My capture card is...

http://www.censuspc.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=VS-L883D&Category_Code=

I have used multiple capture software, all with the same results. So my question is am I just expecting to much ? Will the DVD's I make with my equipment always look grainy when played on a TV compared to the original VHS tapes ?

Thanks for reading

[gshelley61]

Have a look here and read the VHS capture/hardware sections

http://www.digitalfaq.com/

[sacajaweeda]

Try capturing to AVI then converting to MPEG rather than converting to MPEG on the fly durring the capture process. I get better results that way, personally, although there are others who swear by the alternative. Less work and time involved capturing to MPEG, but IMHO there's less quality as well. Unless you are capturing a perfect noiseless video stream that needs no filtering, editing or cleaning, all you are doing is encoding all that junk right into your source file, and as the saying goes.....garbage in, garbage out.

[ethvia]

thanks guys !! I really appreciate the feedback

[freebird73717]

704*480 resolution for a vhs-c tape just seems like a waste to me... I would suggest using 352*480 which is a valid dvd resolution and should look a lot better. I would follow the suggestion to look at the page www.digitalfaq.com. Lord smurf has a lot of great info there including some very good capture guides.