which capture software guys please

[gilbates]

please help guys i need some advice

i have a Hi8 cam connected with svhs to my pinnacle tv card , audio to my sound card , everythings fine and played back on the pinnacle card looks great

but i want to capture the video from my hi8 , pinnacles software is pants for this , mpeg1 setting is too small giving bad results in mm2 and the miro XL setting which gives me the right size 720x 576 isnt recognised by mm2 ( movie maker 2 )

what other software can i use to capture my footage in a format that mm2 recognises

or is there a way to make mm2 recognise the miro XL format ?

i want to put my footage on dvd eventualy but first need to capture it in the best format , which software ?

thanx guys

[Tommyknocker]

Get the Virtual Dub mod to capture, then try the trial version of TMPGEnc Plus to encode to MPEG-2 DVD format.

[gilbates]

thanks m8

will have a go

downloaded it but not installed or tried yet but just about 2

thanks

[gilbates]

just tried it m8

looks like thats what i need

but do you or anyone else have any pointers as to which setting i have things on for capturing my footage

i want the best quality to play back on dvd after it been edited

there are a lot of settings and to be honest which is best is a mine field of trial and error which could take forever , what with importing to mm2 and outputing to see results

[Tommyknocker]

If your card can capture at 720 x 480 without dropping frames, go ahead and use it. If it does drop frames, you can use 352 x 480 as well, without losing much quality.

[gilbates]

352 x 288 seems to be my highest m8

does that mean the overall out put to dvd will b crap eventually

if it is the case and the card is realy only good for tv which to b fair its sold as , i guess i should get a better vid card with inputs like svhs

i know theres always an arguement about whats best but would a rad 9600 or 9500 or sim be ok to get

i dont have a lot of knowledge with buying vid cards , i know this is a bit of topic for this section but i gota sort out my situation as this footage is for a 65 birthday at the start of feb

using mm2 is fine and converting is fine its just getting this capturing right so the out put looks as good as pos

what card would ya recomend if ya have any knowledge , i`m not a big game player just want to capture well

sorry if i have wondered a bit on the topic its l8 here

[Tommyknocker]

Your capture setting may work just fine. Capture or use a sample portion (a few minutes or so) of the video you want to convert. If it still does not suit you, there are drivers you can replace the MS video drivers with, but that is a little more advanced.

[gilbates]

i can prob handle driver changing ok m8

give me a pointer

looked at some test footage and its not good the detail seems to be lacking

tried various settings from rgb - yuy and the like but non i have seen so far give the same output as the footage going in

actual playback is spot on its the stuff saved to the hd thats poor when played back in media played or in mm2

i havent converted it internaly from within mm2 yet and created an output file , but looking at the footage i have got i dont think its gona get much better , if it`s not there at the start it wont b there at the end

sorry m8 but its 2 am here and i gota get up early , so i gota hit the sack , looks like i`m gona wake up l8 ( again )

if ya could post me some pointers i`d b grateful thanks untill tom night when i`m home

[Tommyknocker]

Okay, click here, and look under video drivers.

[andie41]

I have a Pinnacle PCTV Pro and after trial and error, I uninstalled the Pinnacle software completely and installed the BT8x driver from http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/. There are several good capture programs, but the one that worked best for me was VirtualVCR http://virtualvcr.sourceforge.net/ . I capture using the HuffYUV codec and was able to capture at 704x480- 352x480 is certainly acceptable if your system will not capture 704x480, but there is a bit more resolution to be had in the Hi 8 video and 704x480 will provide this.

The above will give you a compressed avi, which you can then encode to Mpeg2 with TMPGenc or another encoder and use an authoring program for your DVD.