Capture Advice Required - DVDr70 or AGP capture card

[jupita]

Hi

I have some 8mm analogue camcorder tapes. This is PAL (25fps). I have 3 choices and I was wondering what will get me the best capture quality for authoring onto DVD later.

1. Use DVDR70 to record my tapes and import the VOBS afterwards
2. Use analogue capture card (ATI Radeon 7200 VIVO)
3. Use DV passthrough (through my JVC GR-DX95)

I am unsure what will give me the best quality. My PC is pretty fast (8x AGP, 1024MB (2x 512 Dual band), Athlon XP 2500 Barton, MSI k7N2-Delta ILSR, 120GB 7200 RPM HDD etc.

I was thinking of using a DVD with the DVDR70 for 1 hour of tape (by choosing the recording quality setting of M1). Does anyone know what bitrate/resolution this gives? The manual says nothing. However please bear in mind that I am going to want to transcode this down later so that it fits on a DVD. I expect to get about 1.5 hours on a disk.

-Darren

[proton]

the M2 mode has 5mbit/sec, so M1 I suspect to be full broadcast quality at 9mbit/sec , resolution is full DVD: 720x576

Note: modes M3 to M6 have half DVD, 360x576.

[jupita]

Sounds very high then. Assuming 9MBPS, do you think I will ultimately get a higher quality capture using the DVDR70 than the other two methods.

I've almost resigned to the fact that capture using VIVO is likely to be much worse (due to frame loss). I guess I need to get an idea of whether the DV passthrough is going to be better than this, as at least I can capture into huffyuv (lossless).

-Darren

[jupita]

OK.

I did some initial tests. The DVDR70 produced excellent results. I couldn't find an indicator for bitrate, but they are good results. I have not managed to do the DV capture method yet? I am sorried however that I am still going to need to transcode the results later in VS to get them onto DVD.

Any idea of whether the DVDR70 is going to be better than capture using my JVC DX95.

-Darren