Capturing from VCR for VCD

[C_Michael]

I have looked to see if there are others looking for the same as I am, but I have not found satisfactory info. Please assist me if you would be as kind.
In the process of capturing from a VCR, using a pinnacle capture card, I see that the resolution settings are at maximum only 640x4??. Is there a trick to capturing the video so that it is on my hard drive as 720. I want it this large with quality as well. The video I am doing is only 18 minutes long, but is required for top quality.

I have printed out the instructions for using the application TMPGEnc, but I am not aware of other applications I should use. I would greatly appreciate any suggestions and / or advice.

Thank you,

Michael

[Anonymous65]

Depending on the Pinnacle capture card, you can get higher resolution if you use VirtualDub for video capture. However, VHS video tape does not have any higehr than 352x480 pixels of resolution. So, if you have a good quality capture card, 352x480, or if you want to do 640x480, will capture more information than is on the video tape. Just make sure you don't use a lot of compression when recording. Use uncompressed AVI, or Mjpeg with no more than 10:1 compression.

[GMFTatsujin]

VirtualDub touts that it can capture at resolutions your video card may not really support. I don't know if this is the case, but Avery's done good by us so far.

The VCD MPEG standard only accepts 352x240 images, but I'll usually capture higher (720x480) and scale down after performing noise reduction on the larger image. This cuts noise down to nearly zero without accentuating the lingering non-subtle effects of the denoising algorythm.

Basically, you're going to have to scale your image down to 352x240 anyway, but I like capturing larger, especially if the source is particularly noisy.

GMFTatsujin