Capturing at 576 x 288 gives good quality VCD

[roh]

Hello,

I am capturing from a Hi8 Video camera, analog, thru my Pinnacle Studio PCTV, Svideo input, using VirtualDub, W98. After many trial and errors, and having been forced to keep to a smaller resolution in order to avoid dropping frames, I found that capturing at 576 x 288 for VCD does not drop frames.

Does anybody have experience if it is better to capture more of horizontal or more in the vertical direction.

Regards,
Roh

[Shabubu]

Vertical, the way TV is encoded the horizontal res isn't as important as the vertical. For PAL (which it sounds like you are) you have to cap 288 or 576 vertical, the first 'loses' half of the information.

Horizontal is more complicated, many people cap at "full" res, which in my opinion is a waste of space, VHS is only 352 pixels wide, broadcast TV is only 500-600 (these are apprximations cause the way the signal is encoded cannot be reduced simple to pixels as the TV "pixels" are fuzzy, not clear cut like in a computer).

Basically use whatever is suitable for you, most of what you see as extra quality from capturing high horizontal res's and downsizing is due to the "natural" noise reduction that comes along with a downsizing procedure, this also smoothes the image and makes it compress better. A decent smoother filter used well has exactly the same effect.

[Anonymous65]

The best capture resolution for VCD is 352x480 (NTSC). If you cannot cap dual field mode and are stuck with 240 vertical pixels, then capture as many horizontal pixels as you can, like 640x240 or 720x240. It will look better than a 352x240 capture for sure, but the best quality is 352x480 (or go with full resolution of 640x480 or 720x480). The Mpeg encoder will perform better when it has more pixels to work with.

[roh]

Thank you for these very useful tips. I will try with moe veritical resolution.

By the way, do you guys know if instead of using Virtualdub to capture audio, is there any other software that can capture directly from the sound card input.

Thanks,
Roh

[Shabubu]

Cdex will record from a soundcard input. It's easier than using any of the other options.