Major Newbie to capturing seeking opinions

[RogueLdr]

I am new to capturing. I have an ATI AIW Radeon card. I used MMC in DVD quality mode to capture my first time. Even though I could adjust the quality of the picture for viewing when I recorded everything was dark. I started reading here and my second attempt was to record in VCD format from MMC but got the same results, everything was dark. I came back here and from futher reading I'm seeing that MMC is not the best choice to capture in. From what I read here VirtualDub is the application of choice to capture video in. I know that there are veterans of the capturing world out there who know or have strong opinions about what application is the best to use for capturing.

[darkelf]

Personal Opinion: Use VirtualDub, not only is it free but it does a fairly decent job with little hassle. This is my personal choice as I do not have the time to learn Adobe Premiere (which I've heard is very nice if you can track down a copy) and no other 'free' cap software is better than VDub.

For an ATI card you will probably need to pick up the vfw-WDM wrapper found here:

http://shopgeo.virtualave.net/wrapper.zip

Since VDub (and several other good tools) use the old Video-4-Windows standard, you will need it to interface with your card and it's WDM drivers.

Also, I've heard that Direct-X v8.1 very helpful to have installed. (NOTE, you should have this installed on your machine before you install MMC) at least that's what they tell me.

You have not mentioned what your final format will be. If Divx/Xvid/OpenDivx/etc then VDub and your fav codec is all you require.

You can choose to capture to LOSSLESS AVI using Huffyuv codec (3x compression generally), use these HUGE files as your masters to edit in VDub, then convert to Divx. Or you can choose to spit the capture directly into the Divx codec you chose in VDub. Dunno how dropped frames/quality may be on that one. I have the HDD space, so I always use Huffy.

Huffy-AVI files are also excellent sources for the TMPGEnc MPEG-1/2 encoder. The howtos on this site recommend this 1-2 punch as the best way to get Analogue caps into the best quality S/X/VCD.

Once you get the hang of VDub you'll wonder how you ever got by without it. Even if you move onto bigger and better editor/encoders, keep VDub handy. It works with nearly all files that use AVI as their container (including Huffy/Divx/DV/etc) as well as MPEG-1 files. Only MPEG-2 files will not load in VDub.

Did you have any specific questions you would like more opinions on?

[RogueLdr]

I have Adobe Premier, should I use that instead of VirtualDub if I have a choice? Hard drive space is no problem for me, I've got about 150gb in a 160MB/s Ultra SCSI3 raid array available for video editing. My goal is to put them in either VCD or SVCD format so I can watch them on my big screen and DVD player. Do either of these products have the ability to start the capture at a certain time? I work two jobs and I'm not home during the times that the tv shows play that I like to watch. I've been recording from the MMC/Guide+ and I just can't deal with the crappy output. Even at the best quality I get dark video and I'm getting 0 loss because my video editing box is top of the line. It's not worth watching with the crap that MMC is giving me.

[rsuave5]

i also have premiere and it captures great! but there is a file limit size of 4 gigs! so i never use it. any way i personally found avi_io to work best and easiest with my ati card i just dont like the virtuadub initerface. so try out for yourself but to me for just capturing avi_io is easiest, no dropped frames and great quality