Help with Capture cards against dvd recorder

[victoriabears]

Ok guys,here goes.

Over the years I have used:-

advc 300 (Now sold)
ATI AIW 9800 (Returned)

Various dvd recorders (RJ Tech/Toshiba) and now have a jvc M100, both pal and ntsc versions.

Also in my two computers I have Canopus mvr 1000 and Hauppage 350, reminder I have two computers, so do not have both in one computer.

Try as I might, using a tbc1000 or a AVT 8710 I cannot seem to get the same quality from these capture cards as the dvd recorders.

Any suggestions, as for my longer projects, using the capture cards would be really good, and it doesn;t seem to matter what vcr I use as my vhs recordings are very good, but for the record I use ntsc jvc 9911 and uk vcr jvc 8965.

Thanks everyone, any help would b e most appreciated.

[Cole]

This is probably not very helpful, Victoriabears, but I just thought that I would share it:

I recently did an experiment where I compared the capture quality of my DVD Recorder (Sony 510) and my Canopus ADVC50.

In both instances the source was from a Sony digital receiver. I encoded the ADVC capture (using TMPGEnc) to a relative bit rate to the DVD Recorder's two hour mode and also transferred the DVD recorder's capture to the PC. When I compared the same frame from each video the difference was there but very slight; I don't have the screen captures any more, but IIRC the ADVC capture was ever-so-slightly darker.

With VHS conversions, because of other problems that could occur with the various state of tapes, I am willing to suffer a little reduction in quality to achieve a more stable result. Quality is important, don't get me wrong, but an unstable video will be a poor conversion regardless of how good the picture looks.

For example, I was having a bad time with some tapes where the picture was freezing or frames skipping. As it turned out it was a problem with the tape's signal and the ADVC. The answer was to get a TBC-100. However, the TBC did have a slight detrimental effect on the picutre.
See here: https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?p=1401519#1401519
and here: https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?p=1402435#1402435

For my piece of mind I bought a cheap video enhancer (Copymate) to put back some of the loss in quality. It didn't put it back 100% (probably around 95%) but when watched back on a television it was perfectly okay.

DVD Recorders do have various in built filters to improve the picture, but in my experience, my Video PC can deal with more problems than the DVD Recorder can (frame skipping, macrovision & the bit rate hungry overscan bar at the bottom of the screen).

The DVD Recorder will always be my first choice for off-air capture, but I think that what I am trying to say is that, even though I have a good DVD Recorder, I will still stick to my video PC's set up for VHS conversion as I feel confident that I will achieve the most stable end product; if this means a 'slight' reduction in quality then so be it.

[victoriabears]

Your comments/observations are very helpful and as I have found in the last week very true.

What I sometimes fail to realise is that my vhs collection os of very good quality and I have been trying too hard to get it to DVD quality,I have tried 720x576 at 9000kbs and found it macroblocked, took it down to 4 hour mode on my dvd recorder therefore 352x576 at 4000kbits and it looks better ! Also using rca plugs not s video is often better (again !!).
Although as a brit you'll appreciate that scart seems to be tops of everything.

But it still seems a dvd recorder gives more reliable captures,but you are right a PC can be used to enhance /edit/convert much better.

[guns1inger]

You will never get DVD quality from a VHS source - there just isn't enough information or quality in the signal.

If you are getting macroblocks from a 9000kbps encode, you are doing something wrong somewhere. You don't say what encoder you are using on your PC - unless it is a hardware encoder, in which case you shouldn't capture straight to mpeg.

[Barnabas]

victoriabears,

I have 2 DVD Recorders plus a Canopus ADVC-55. For VHS to DVD conversions, I ONLY use the Canopus, as it transfers the VHS to my computer where I can tweak it to improve the final result. Using either Virtualdub or Avisynth provides substantially more options than a DVD recorder, and the results are MUCH better on noisy source videos. The results are not nearly that different when the VHS is of very high quality to start with however.

I also have a TBC btw

[victoriabears]

well i have tried lots of different stuff, 1st a advc300 and using cyberlink power producer mpeg encoder and it wasn't all that bad considering the crap reviews cyberlink gets.

Now I use a Hauppauge pvr 350 with wintv2000, and am getting better and better at using it,but its still more reliable picture quality wise to use a dvd recorder but its just easier if I could learn on a pc capture route. I tried a Canopus mvr1000 but it wasn;t any bettre than the haupauge.

My PC is a Gigabyte MB, Celeron 3200, and 1 gbyte ram. 330 gbyte sata raid drives.
Kept very clean and really only used for video editing and internet browsing with all the usual protection software.

Really appreciate all the advice.

[Barnabas]

victoriabears,

I also have a PVR-250, but took it out of the computer, as I no longer use it. The default sharpness with the 250/350 is only 2 out of 7, and you have to use graph-edit to turn the sharpnes up unless Hauppauge finally added a sharpness control to WinTV 2000.

Sounds like you were encoding to MPEG-2 on the fly with the canopus? That's not going to get you the best quality. Only real-time mpeg-2 encoder that works fairly well with the Canopus is the one with Ulead Video Studio.

You also need a VERY good VCR, like a JVC with digipure. Makes lots of difference.

It's not really that hard to capture to the PC. The steps I use are as follows:

1: capture/transfer to PC via canopus ADVC-55 (DV firewire)
2: Open DV file in VirtualDub.
3: Apply filters, tweak, cut, remove logos, etc.
4: Frameserve to encoder.
5: Encode to MPEG-2 with TMPGEnc or CCE basic
6: Author in TMPGEnc DVD Author
7: Burn to disk

If you don't want to try to improve the video, you can skip steps 2,3, and 4.