How Do Get the best Quality DVD From Camcorder tape

[girovend]

Hi,
Just recently made my first home DVD from an old analog camcorder,
I used a USB2 mpeg capture card ,Ulead DVD movie factory,and captured at high quality DVD,
my pc has an Athlon 2000xp with 1gig ram,
question is although everything turned out ok, the actual image quality is not really what I would have hoped for,
the camcorder only has composite output so Im stuck there,
I read on this forum that maybe it would have been better to capture to AVI instead and then convert it to mpeg,
but being a novice I'm really looking for any ideas on getting better image
quality
any feedback appreciated

[daamon]

Hi girovend,

The first thing you need to know is that there is no "best" for a number of reasons:

"Best" is subjective, and only you can decide what's best, or suits you.
"Best" is influenced by time, budget, experience and knowledge.

Of course, there are crap ways of doing things and there are good ways of doing things - but you'll be hard pushed to find one single way of doing something that everyone agrees is the best and is affordable by Joe Public.

I'm not experienced with analog camcorders or composite output, so I can't offer any meaningful hints or tips around that.

However, I will say that capturing direct to MPEG2 is considered by some to be avoided because the encoder is working "on the fly" and has to effectively "rush" the job of encoding so it doesn't get swamped and drop (lose) frames. As we all know, a rushed job is never a good one.

You may receive suggestions to plug your analog camcorder into something like a Canopus ADVC-100 (or similar) - a box of electronics that's an analog to digital signal converter, which connects via firewire to the PC and the footage is captured as DV AVI by software like WinDV.

Also, the general consensus is that DV AVI is much better suited to editing than MPEG2. The MPEG2 format is designed as more of an "end product" format, not for editing.

If you do need to edit MPEG2, people regularly recommend VideoReDo and / or MPEG-VCR Wizard.

There are also capture cards that do the same thing as the AVDC-100 - I'm not sure of the pros and cons of one over another.

Check out lordsmurf's site (he's a moderator here) - www.digitalfaq.com - it may well have some useful stuff.

A general tip - Get yourself a re-writeable DVD. No more coasters!

I hope that helps some. Good luck...

[girovend]

Thanks for the links daamon,
made interesting reading,but looks looks like I'm stuck with what I'm doing

[reboot]

What's the make and model of your capture device?

[edDV]

Quality issues point directly to your "USB2 mpeg capture card"

Reasonable quality benchmark here for MPeg2 (hardware based) capture is the Hauppauge PVR-250
http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wintvpvr250_datasheet.htm

There are other ways to get a result but substituting capture devices should improve your quality with your current capture technique.

By reasonable quality I mean closely matching what you see playing the camcorder into a TV. Enhancement is an advanced topic.

[girovend]

Capture device is USB2 Xpert DVD Maker by V-Stream,
had to get usb2 as I have no slots left,
Its supposed to be able to capture at 720x576 @ a bit rate of 8000
but when I try that it drops frames all over the place,
Possibly because the Athlon 2000xp I'm using is about the minimum requirements,
I've started to use ulead video studio and this allows me to capture to DVD
at 352x288 bit rate 4000 ,
I've found that doing this gives me no dropped frames at all and quality
is still quite good

[stillmars321]

Although pricey, the new Sony DVD Direct device captures from camcorder/VCR without a need for computer. It captures, encodes and burns to DVD on the fly! Automatic chapter and menu creation. Quality is outstanding with myconversions. It doesn't get any easier.

[ozymango]

Capture device is USB2 Xpert DVD Maker by V-Stream,
had to get usb2 as I have no slots left,
Its supposed to be able to capture at 720x576 @ a bit rate of 8000
but when I try that it drops frames all over the place

I hope this isn't a dumb question but are you plugging this into a USB 2.0 slot or a USB 1 slot? I checked the specs and this device will "work" on both types of USB connections but if your system is older and you're using the onboard USB slots, maybe those are USB 1.1 not USB 2.0? I don't know the evolution of Athlon motherboards so maybe they always came with USB 2.0.

EDIT: I was looking at the specs for that device again and it said it supported "realtime mpeg 2 encoding" which I thought meant it was a hardware encoder (so it shouldn't tax your system much at all). But I read the fine print and apparently it uses software encoding, darn. So I think you may just be hitting the limits of this device, though if it does use software encoding, it should be capable of just feeding raw avi files to your PC, higher quality, then compress them to mpeg2 later? That would allow for much better image quality, if you've got the disc space.

Anyway, you might wanna try this to see if it makes a difference -- you should be able to capture using ulead software as an avi file, not mpeg, and then after it's captured, you can render it (using ulead) to DVD, check the help menu, it's pretty basic. You could capture a few minutes of video that way (again assuming you've got disc space) and see how that looks to you. Good luck!

[girovend]

As I said before this is all quite new to me,
I knew something wasnt right because of the jerkiness of
the picture,
but it wasnt till I tried cyberlink power director that I knew what the
problem was as this program shows the number of dropped frames
during capture,
and earlier on I tried to capture in AVI format but I was dropping
as many frames as I was when capturing to mpeg2,
(was capturing at 720x576 tho )
Think I'll just have to settle for what I'm doing till I get either a faster
processor or better capture device