God Help Me: PCTV, VDub, and Pinnacle Studio 7

[yamato72]

Guys I'm at my wit's end. I'm capturing my personal collection of Hi8 tapes and some old VHS stuff. It will all end up on DVD. I want to be able to play back on a stand-alone DVD player as well as on my PC. I've been researching and reading stuff on this site for weeks and am not having success. Read on:

1st attempt: got Pinnacle Studio Deluxe from CCity for $189 (they matched Best Buy). Did some caps and thought the quality was okay. Loved the editing features of Studio 7. Researched here some more, and decided I wanted more flexibility than just hardware DV.

2nd attempt: Back to CCity, traded the SDL for a Studio AV for -get this- $30 (They matched CompUSA that time). This has the DC10+ card. Captured the same footage at max quality mjpeg and compared them side-by-side. The DC10 was better (especialy the color), but I read some more and decided it was time to try VDub and TMPGen. I figured I'd keep the card just for the Studio software.

3rd attempt: Picked up a PCTV and tried some caps in VDub with Huffy. I'm using the bt8x8 driver. I'm dropping no frames. I'm off to a good start but here are the problems:

1) When I try the deinterlace filter, or the smart deinterlace filter in VDub, the preview looks fine but the output has a diagonal line going through the frame, washed out color, and even worse lines. After converting to mpeg2 in TMPGen it's even worse.

2) I can't edit the frickin' AVIs in Studio 7 because VDub makes Type 1 files and Studio only reads Type 2 (thanks Pinnacle).

Someone please suggest a hardware/software solution for $200 or less that will let me capture with Huffy (or equivalent), make some cuts and transitions, and (maybe) some titles, and end up in mpeg2. My hardware handles 720X480 29.97 FPS no problem. One interface would be nice but if I have to go through some hops that's okay because I'm archiving my stuff for posterity and want the best possible quality.

Thanks in advance.

[presto]

I made plenty of CD's by capturing with VDub and then using Pinnacle Studio 7. I noticed it did not like Huffy so I used no compression (I have 120 GB drive).

[yamato72]

Presto, I tried uncompressed and I can open the file in Studio (phew). If I continue on this route I'll have to pony up for a bigger HD, though. 18 minutes of capture time (30GB) would be tough to work with.

How do you export out of Studio after you've done your editing? If I choose all options for codecs, I can't save as AVI uncompressed. YUV and huffy are available but seem to come out as garbage.

Any thoughts? And I'm still open to other hardware/software suggestions.

Thanks

[presto]

With Studio 7 I would go to "make a movie" and choose mpeg then select VCD or SVCD compatible. I then burned the resulting mpg with TMPEng.

Now with Studio 8 I can choose "make Disk".

I am finding that if I capture with Studio 8 the sound is sometimes out of sync. Capturing with Virtual Dub the audio is synced and quality is better.