Newbie's Configuration Questions

[Frogman_Pepper]

As the forum displays I am a newbie in regards to video production. My post's objective is to get me going in the right direction. Recenty a friend came to me with all of his VHS tapes and wanted to convert them to DVD. My goal has been to become a well-rounded designer and figured this was the time to start dwelving into the video world. I purchased a cheap capture card and played with the configuration and finally converted the video to my HD, when I played the video back their were freezes in the video where there shouldn't be. I figured somewhere my system is lagging. The two components that seem to shout out are the video card or the capture card, what follows is my system's configuration. Please advice where I should upgrade and any deatailed reasons, links, tweaks, etc.. are welcome.

Thank you,

Andy

Motherboard: Intel D850EMV2
Processor: P IV 2.4 GHz 400 mHZ fsb
OS: Windows XP Pro SP2
RAM: PC800 768 MB RDRAM
Video Card: NVidia GeForce4 MX 4000 64 MB
Capture Card: USB instant Video (P/N: USBAV-170)

[normcar]

The video card is not the problem, and the rest of your system seems good enough. I would recommend the Hauppage 350 capture card, so you can capture directly to MPEG 2 at high resolution. However, if you want the best capture, you should get a very good SVHS JVC deck (JVC HR-S9911U/ TBC bulit-in) and a very good TBC (Datavideo TBC-1000). The TBC in the JVC is not as good as the TBC-1000, but it has the best playback output. You can do additional searches on TBC, but a TBC will stablize the picture, and remove copy protection. This setup will get you the best capture available for a reasonable price.

JVC HR-S9911U --> TBC-1000 --> Hauppage 350 capture card --> Author.

By the way, you cannot legally copy a VHS tape, but the law does allow you to backup the VHS tape for your own use.

[wwjd]

Does your capture card have on board hardware encoding? If not, then you may be dropping frames due the load on your CPU. Capturing and converting analog on the fly is very CPU intensive, even for a 2.4Ghz. If this is what you are doing you will need to make sure everything that can be shut down is, during the capturing. Things like screen savers, anti-virus software, automatic web updates, drive checking and so on. You should also be capturing to a HD that is not your C drive.

The best bet is to either purchase a capture card that has on board hardware encoding or get a DVD recorder. The limitation with the DVD recorder is that it is harder to do editing of the video.

[Frogman_Pepper]

WOW, talk about response time, and thanks for all the recommendations.

[normcar]

The Hauppage 350 has an onboard MPEG-2 converter. If you do not need to do extensive editing, then you should save directly to MPEG, which will save you time for large volumes of work. If you want to do extensive editing, then save as an uncompressed AVI, which will use large amoust of HD capacity.

[mitchedo]

I capture mpeg2 at 720x480 8Mb/sec with an AGP ATI AIW 9000. It uses less than 50% of my Athlon 1800+ to do so. I capture with the McAffee antivirus running, and the network cable plugged in. I get good quality captures. I was getting jerky video until I turned the motion compensation to 99%.

When I had a PCI AIW 128, it never would capture smooth video. I can't remember if I ever messed with the motion compensation on that card or not. It seems that the PCI card was using 100% cpu cycles, but don't quote me on that, cuz I can't really remember.

A hardware MPEG2 card would be spiffy, but your system is plenty fast enough to capture in software. The problem is either in your settings, or the USB bus. ...perhaps the AGP bus is better suited for capturing? Maybe your hard drive is fragmented?