Capture Annoyances

[mcorpse]

I am quite annoyed with the quality I have been getting from my TV Wonder VE card. I've occasionally somehow been able to capture something and have it not look absolutely hideous, but now, even when capping from a virgin tape, I cannot get proper quality out of it. Even if I just cap the blue screen my VCR shows when it is not playing I still get it all noisy and with moving lines and etc. The quality isn't entirely 100%hideous however, until I encode it to VCD, and then all of that noise ends up making it look like utter crap. I do noise reduction, and unless it's a cartoon, the people come out looking like blobs.

Anybody know what I could do to solve my problem?


Thanks

[Tommyknocker]

What program are you using to capture, and what is your hardware.

[mcorpse]

Well, I've tried everything from realtime MPEG with ATI MMC and WinDVD Recorder, to VirtualDub and VirtualVCR with Huffy. My card (as I've mentioned) is an ATI TV Wonder VE, my comp's rather slow, but I'm not getting dropped frames or anything. Even previewing the video looks shitty. It's pissing me off...

[Tommyknocker]

Do you know how to display a screen capture. I want to see what you are talking about quality wise.

[mcorpse]

The problem isn't particularly noticable at the resolution at which I capture, and if I attempt to take a pic at a higher resolution it'll look like shit just because of the increased res. The problem mainly manifests itself as horrible encoding artifacts as a result of the noisy-as-hell video. I'm using composite rather than the tuner (which gave me even worse results), so that's not the problem.

I know it doesn't look particularly bad, but on a TV it looks hideous, and it is DEFINATELY extremely inferior to the quality of many TV rip South Park and Dragnet, etc. episodes I have seen.

[kzPhaze]

What codec, bitrate, and settings (interlaced, etc) are you using to capture your source?

[lordsmurf]

What codec, bitrate, and settings (interlaced, etc) are you using to capture your source?

This is important.

Also, have you read any guides lately?

[kzPhaze]

Tell me about it, I learned most of it from your site oh Papa Smurf

[mcorpse]

That screenshot is of it encoded as NTSC VCD w/TMPGEnc. The source file was encoded with Huffy, so that's not the problem. I'm using VCD res (352x240) for my capture. VirtualVCR doesn't have any capture settings that could be screwing things up, and I let TMPGEnc automatically set the interlacing, telecine, etc. settings. (Anyway, it looks like shit even before TMPGEnc - it only makes it worse due to the noise.)

[mcorpse]

And I've read many guides (Dr. Mercury's before it went paid, many of the ones off of here, etc.), and none of them have really fixed the problem. (In fact, the one capture I was able to do that somehow looked decent I didn't even follow a guide for at all. I believe it was a VHS copy of Flatliners, but the reason that it looked decent was probably due to the fact that the picture was quite dark and so the noise didn't interfere as much with the encode quality.)

[MOVIEGEEK]

Get a better capturecard(ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder) or use a analog to DV converter(DAC100) which you connect to your PC via firewire.

[kzPhaze]

Mcorpse, are you making sure you are capturing your source as interlaced with the captured card?

[mcorpse]

I'm not certain Virtual VCR has that setting... perhaps I'll try VirtualDub later tonight and see if it does.

[mcorpse]

Hmm...I got interlacing working with Huffy, but I noticed that TMPGEnc also has some interlacing settings, and by trial and error I figured out what I believe to be the best ones for my capture. Anyone who can help me out further?

[mcorpse]

Here's a clip from one of my (still rather shitty looking) captures. I capped it at 640x480 as Smurf's guide suggests, with Huffy set at force @ 480. Then, I encoded it as VCD with TMPGEnc, interlaced, top field first (this was all automatically set by TMPG), 1:1 ratio.

And I still got a rather crappy capture. This one is slightly better than some of myother ones, but it still has way too many artifacts to be really watchable... I dunno.

http://members.lycos.co.uk/killbillclips/mummyretcap.mpg

[proxyx99]

Yeah, these are really shitty looking captures but this movie doesn't deserve any better. Gotta tinker around your capture app, try different apps and sources. If no change buy a better card. It all starts with your initial material. Go to ATI site, find out what are the capabilities of this card and call support if you are not getting it. In case of ATI, drivers seem to be the point you should start your investigation from.

[mcorpse]

*Sigh* I knew somebody was gonna trash me about that flick. It was the only tape I have that hasn't been watched before, and I used it as to prove that I was using virgin tapes.

I doubt, however, that it is entirely my card's fault. Certainly it does not give the same quality as a DV box, and I do not expect it to. However, the quality I am getting is muchos inferior to that which I know others with similar cards to get. I'll have to dick around a bit, try different cables, etc. I wonder if perhaps my noise problem is coming from interference from other components around the card. I have everything from a turntable to a digital camera plugged in to my machine, so it may have something to do with that, too. Or else it may just be that the VCR I have (which produces rather shitty output, but I didn't think it was THAT shitty...) is at fault. I'll screw around a bit, and hopefully I'll be able to get better results eventually.

Thanks for all your help, everyone.

[vcd4ever]

mcorpse,

The quality of the samplefile "mummyretcap.mpg" was really bad, but the quality was better then expected.

vcd4ever.

[proxyx99]

First, if you post some flix the you should choose ones that are brighter with some static backgrounds and also fast moves. What you did is barely visible.
1. make sure u have latest driver (uninstal, clean registry and reinstall drivers (most makers provide regclean util. on werbsites)
2. get best avail source (DVD or DV cam) and record some clips from that
3. choose some well lit scenes to evaluate pixelation.
Don't worry about encoding, it's gonna be no better then your source.
These steps are to determin where you are in terms of card / driver capability. If satisfied, go from there.

[XBucklawX]

I'm going to take a stab at this !

I also have an ati tv wonder ve, and from my internet reading, i've found that the ati tv wonder ve captures at a maximum resolution of 320 X 240 !
So if you have software that captures at a higher resolution, than obviously that captured file will not look good at all. I found that out the hard way.

The bigger you make the captured file, the worse the quality will be.
Even when i've recorded 720 X 480 using iuvcr, and burnt it on my dvd burner, it still doesn't look good as the original vhs tape !

[mcorpse]

Okay, I'll try doing some caps from my DVD player - it seems to ring a bell as producing muchos better caps than from VHS (perhaps it IS, indeed, my VCR).

I have already cleared out and reinstalled the drivers since I had tried those open source BT drivers, but they only f**ked up my tuner, so I reinstalled those new official ones after performing a full clearout.

I've already tried using well-lit scenes with lots of action (from a trailer for one of the Tremors movies), and due to the color pallette, they looked better, but whenever any sort of motion occurred, there would be a lot of blockiness and artifacts.

[proxyx99]

That says that there is a bottleneck somwhere in your setup, that keeps bitrate down or chokes capture to low bit rate. It may be codec or capture settings. You seem to encode to VCD and that is 1.5 Mbps vs 4 Mbps plus for a decent MPEG 2. Try capturing to different formats like AVI, MPEG 2 and see if this happens. Avi capture will be a good test for dropped frames. If you are not droping frames check your software setup. If that's not helping then it must be your hardware. Check with ATI as to what can you realistically expect from this card. I remember when I was using Matrox some time ago, driver reinstallation always kept some files intact even though they were supposed to be overwritten with newer version (in my opinion). It took a phonecall to learn about that, 30 min. later I was flying. If not for that I could have been reinstalling until the end of the world without success. To troublershoot you need to eliminate possibilities and that requires knowledge not guessing. Learn from horses mouth and call ATI. Check knowledgebase as well. Newsgroups search on Google will tell you about other users experiences and solutions. Start from there and follow steps I gave you before systematicaly until you narrow down possible causes. Hardware failure is a least likely possibility. In most cases it's a human error.

[lordsmurf]

The problem is easy for me to see. Bad install of drivers/software AND dropped frames AND noisy VHS source.

Fix it.