Which Video Capture Resolution should I use????

[storm828]

I want to transfer some of my Hi8 recordings to DVD. I have an ATI All In Wonder Radeon 7500 that I am using to do the captures from the camcorder. What is the best resolution to capture in? Should I capture in 640 (or 720) x 480 and then deinterlace in VirtualDub? Another option is to capture in 320x240 and resize with VirtualDub, that way I don't have to worry about deinterlacing. Capturing in 320x240 and encoding to MPEG2 at 720x480 gives terrible results.

Any ideas???

[t0nito]

Why would you want to deinterlace? If your video source in Hi8 then most likely it comes from a camcorder right? Then I think you should capture at full resolution then in tmpgenc choose dvd resoultion. Be sure to choose "keep aspect ratio" and encode in interlace. It should detect field order automaticaly if not try encoding a little part of the video in field order A first and another in B. In my interlace captures I have to choose always A.

[Dave B]

For DVD production you should capture in the full DVD resolution (720x480). The main reasoning behind this is:

1. Capturing at a vertical resolution of 480 will capture both fields of the video. Capturing at 240 you were effectively throwing half the information away.

2. Capturing at 720x480 will avoid introducing artifacts by resizing the video during conversion.

3. Most obviously, a decent 720x480 capture contains about 4.5 times the information that a 320x240 capture provides. The higher the source quality.. the higher the destination quality.

Resolution aside, you must also ensure that you are capturing to a high quality codec. Most people on this site capture to either HUFFYUV or MJPEG with a quality setting >18. You will not acheive good results if you are capturing real time into a particularly lossy format such as MPEG or DivX.

[Spicuzza]

storm828,

I also use a Hi8 camcorder to film my son's high school wrestling matches. I use ATI All in Wonder 128 Pro in conjunction with Ulead VideoStudio 6.0 for capture/editing/encoding/burning.

Try this:
Capture 352 x 480 frame size, uncompressed AVI format.
Encode the uncompressed AVI to XVCD MPEG-1 352 x 240 @ 2300 kbps, this assumes your DVD player will play XVCD. This plays very nicely on my Pioneer DV-343.

You'll find that the resulting video will be just under the quality of the source tape, about what you would get when you copy VHS tape to VHS tape.

It's best to experiment with about a minute clip to see what settings give the best results utilizing the equipment you have.

Hope this helps.

Gary Spicuzza
cic7@juno.com

[t0nito]

Why reducing the resolution to 352x240 and lose half the resolution & fields? XVCD is fully compatible with 352x480 but if you rather have interlaced image -I think it would look better in camcorder captures- then try a SVCD @ 352x480 MPEG-2 instead of 480x480. I think you will not notice the diference because of the fact that video is captured from a cam and it will save you CD space so you will be able to squeeze in a few extra minutes of video. This is what people call CVD - China vcd which I think is used most often in china.