Pixelated Captures

[Peter H]

Hi
i have been trying to capture some home movies but when i am capturing, when the camera pans the picture becomes really pixelated. i have the video camera hooked up via s video. can some one help me. my capture program is ulead video studio 6.

[Fozzee]

Before anyone can comment we need to know what capture settings you are using.
Resolution,bitrate, avi or mpeg1/2 etc.

Fozz

[Peter H]

it is on all settings i dont know bit rate but when i capture in mpeg 1 and 2 and also avi it happens. it hasnt happened before but i uninstalled ulead video studio but had to install it again that was when it started to do it. i am using the preset settings that the program has for mpeg 1 and 2. i am capturing in pal.

[Peter H]

would it help if i defraged the hdd. i only have the one hdd at the moment it is 20gig. i want to get a nother hdd but at the moment i dont have the money so i have to make do. i have evrything on this hard drive. will it stuff it up if i defrag it, and do i need a special program to do it (i only ask because everyone talks about defragging the hdd).

Thanks

[disturbed1]

Pixelation is a by product of poor mpeg encoding.

To achieve higher quality capture to an uncompressed format, (or lossy like huffyuv, etc) then use an mpeg encoder like TMPG, CCE.

You can try the updates at Ulead for the MpegNow encoding engine, they claim to have improved the quality.
http://www.ulead.com/tech/vs/vs_ftp60.htm

Defragging your drive realigns data to the front of the cylinder heads to allow you to capture in a continued block alignment rather than fragmented blocks here and there.

[CaptainC]

Its sounds as if you have variable (VBR) bit rate and this is not set high enough for motion search VBR is not very good on realtime capture as it works on the premise that it scans for motion search and then writes the correct packets this cant really be done too well on this level of software and devices your best bet is CBR constant bit rate. You will find it near impossible to find an editor to cut VBR if you need to edit CBR not really a problem with programs like MP2 edit pro etc.