My 720x480 capture does not have a great quality.What to do?

[fgtan]

Hi, I have a studio pctv n I try to capture a cable signal with V Dub in 720x480 res. the image does not have a good quality.
I would like to have a close to dvd image quality capture to burn my captures.
I tried lots of video codecs n none gives me the expected results...
Should I try to change my capture board??? If so, wich capture board would give me that dvd quality???

Thanxs

[drewson99_99]

A lot of people will prolly disagree with me, but I cap with an AIW s-video in at 15MBps/720-480 in MPEG2, then re-encode the cap at the desired dvd bitrate/resolution with TMPGEnc.

I get near dvd-quality always, sometimes it looks better than some dvds I see.

[joeAgain------]

Fgtan,

what bitrate are you capping it with? That makes a big difference....try increasing the bitrate to 800000 or so(or as high as drewson99_99 recommends).

can you set the bitrate with V Dub?

[crahak]

Mostly, what are you capturing? VHS tapes?... Even capturing from a DVD player's output playing a retail DVD, you'd get significantly (mind you, lots of people look at their VCD captures of old VHS tapes and think it's better than DVD...) lower quality than "ripping" the DVD, no matter what codec/settings you use. give us some more info so we can help better?

[fgtan]

Thanxs my friends 4 the help n support...

Ok, let me be more specific.

1st doubt I have is if this capture board I have will give that dvd image quality...
If so, how to improove it?

I tried a hole bunch of settings, with lots of codecs. The best ( but not the expected one) result I got was setting the codec capture to divx 5 pro codec at 704x480 resol, variable bitrate at 10000 kbps.

But I think my problem is my capture card, I talked today with brazilian pinnacle support n they told me that this specific card only supports up to 384x288 captures... Does anybody knows if this information is right???
Cause I can capture in Vdub at higher resolutions. Is it possible that Vdub would do the capture n enlarging this resolution would give me loss of image quality???
Thanks to u all, n hope I can find a way out of this problem...


By the way , I´m capturing from a cable tv signal.


Thanxs

[snowmoon]

Even a good cable broadcast will vary in quality from provider to provider. There are hundreds of factors that affect the quality of the cable signal. Oh, most capture cards are based on the bt8x8 chipset that can deliver 720x480 video.

I have learned many tricks for cleaning up analog source and the can improve the watchability of the clips, but they do affect the overall fidelity of the video. Personally most of my TV caps end up being resized down to 352x480 to help reduce noise and bitrate requirements.

Just so you don't get your hopes up you will NEVER reach DVD quality. DVD's usually come from hi-resolution film sources with color channels that have not been castrated. The best you can hope for is to come ( very ) close to what you see when you watch the original broadcast.