Trying again...

[EndBoards]

Ok, I posted yesterday but didn't get any responses, maybe it was way too long. Here's the short version:

I'm in the process of building a new machine and need to decide which video components to go with. I've read & searched alot of the forums and have found people who use AIW's, but no real opinions on it's capabilities or the quality of their capturing abilities.

My first question is whether AIW cards the real deal or just consumer grade "toys"??? My goal here is to capture (at the highest) SVHS quality video and burn it to DVD. If I capture with an AIW card, will I be able to do this w/o noticeable loss of quality between the original tape and finished DVD?

Thanks

[macleod]

unless you go high end, most of the cap cards are "toys". The results you get with be based on what settings and whatnot that you use. I have a TV wonder card and have seen other cap card results (other consumer toys) and they all look the same to me.

You can get the $20-$50 card tv wonder PCI and run with it. There is no magic formula AND you will notice a change in quality as you are going from an analog source to a digital source. Depending upon what you end up doing, you may or may notice a difference.

[Richard_G]

Bear in mind that the image at DVD quality is 720 x 576 (PAL) or 720 x 480 (NTSC). The quality of your SVHS tapes will be less than this so as long as the card you get is capable of capturing at this size (and even the TV cards and other consumer toys are) then the captured/burned DVDs will be as good as the originals. They won't be as good as a bought DVD no matter what you use, you can't get back quality that wasn't there in the first place. The ATI AIW cards are good, the later Radeon ones are very good 3D video cards too. The software can be a bit on the picky side but once set up, will do everything you want to do with it.

[EndBoards]

Thanks for the replies. It seems that within the realm of what I can afford, AIW's are as good as anything else...

The quality of your SVHS tapes will be less than this so as long as the card you get is capable of capturing at this size (and even the TV cards and other consumer toys are) then the captured/burned DVDs will be as good as the originals. They won't be as good as a bought DVD no matter what you use, you can't get back quality that wasn't there in the first place.

I was pretty sure this is true based on the reasearch I've done. I know the GIGO principle pretty well from my audio (recording, mixing, etc.) backround. Theoretically though, if I had a DVD quality source, the AIW's could capture it in DVD quality resolution. That's above and beyond what I want/need but I was mostly wanting to make sure that the AIW wasn't way behind some other consumer grade card...

Let me ask you this, after going through the process described in Lordsmurf's guide and being burned to DVD, do the captures on these lower grade cards compare pretty well with the SVHS original?