Just can NOT ! get good captures

[mike_in_sd]

capturing from a Canon digital camcorder

I bought a dvraptor off of ebay and was dissapointed with quality of capture. When there is movement in the video it gets real fuzzy. Im talking on the computer monitor AND on the TV once it was made into a vcd/svcd. I bought a firewire card and got the same results.

I read and read on here and came to the conclusion that it has something to do with interlacing, although you would have thought that once I wrote it back as a vcd/svcd and played it on the tv, that it would have cleared back up.

I have tried several different programs, capturing with de-interlace and It is STILL ! fuzzy/blurry during movement.

I have played a little with virtualdub and just can not seem to get it to work ( at all ) it comes back with an error message about .. no frames grabed .. and to lower res or bit rate or something like that.

This seems like a really fun hobby .. and I cant wait to start making some home movies .. but .. I would really like to get this straightened out first.

thanks
Mike

[spectroelectro]

You mention you are authoring VCDs.
SEveral possibilities come to mind:
[1] VCD is a low bitrate format. To put it bluntly, VCDs look like crap when there's a lot of motion. The 1150 kbits/sec bitrate just can't keep the video from breaking up because there's not enough information bandwidth.
In this is your problem, the solution is to capture to DVD format (720 x 480 24 bits AVI) and author DVD with a decent bitrate -- for VBR, say, 4000 to 6000 av, 8000 max. That's 4 to 5 times the bitrat eof a VCD.
[2] Sicne youg et the same reults through a firewire card, the issue can't be your captures. It must be your authoring. I use a firewire card (with a Canopus ADVC-100) and I get superb results. Capturing straight AVI through a firewire card gives you a 25 megabit/sec DV AVI, which is super high video quality. Therefore the problem _must_ be the result of whatever you're doing to encode the video.
It's jsut barely possible that the problem involves the wrong field order. Remember that DV always uses lower field first, sometimes called Field B. Check your TMPG setting. Should be lower field first. If not, change it.
Wrong field order capture can produce video fuzziness, so that might be your problem right there.
[3] Have you checked your DVRaptor capture drivers/ There are probably newer ones available at the Canopus website. Register your DVraptor and download the latest DVRaptor drivers. (However I doubt this is the sissue, since you say you get the same problem with striaght firewire). Still, can't hurt to have the latest capture drivers.
[4] From your message it sounds as though you also occasionally get problems with TMPG reading your AVI files in. I had this problem a while back. Solution? Download hte free Canopus DV file converter. I had to convert my Type 2 DV AVI files into Type 2 DV using the Caopus file converter. Yeah, I know, makes no sense -- but it solved the problem. Try it. You can find the Canopus DV file converter as a free download (it's freeware, they're giving it away) on the TOOLs section in this website.
---
You should be able to get primo quality DVDs out of a firewire DV capture. I know because that's the way I capture video, and my DVDs look at least as good as the original TV signal. Dpedningon the bitrate you set for the DVRaptor , you should be getting outstanding quality captures from that too.
Hint: Always capture to DV AVI format and then use TMPGENC to conver to your format. Lots of quality problems when you try to capture MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 in real time either through the DVRaptor or from Firewire.

[Heavensent]

try to change the field order.
if you use tmpeg here is what you need to do :

load the avi and select the templete that you want.
press "settings"
select "advanced"
in the "field order" option select the other option than
you have now.

top field first or bottom field first.

i think that should work.

[mike_in_sd]

I really really appreciate the replies guys but .. I am afraid that I must not have explained my problem clearly.

The acutual capture is fuzzy/blurry ...

No matter what software I use to capture with .. ulead video, RaptorCapture, Tempgen ... the AVI they create during the capture is fuzzy during any fast movement within the video.

Tried Raptor card .. and .. firewire card

I tried changing the field order
I tried capturing de-interlace

All the other "blurry" posts I have read, deal with it being blurry AFTER editing and rendering .... most of the guru's seem to agree that capturing DV is nothing more than copying it to your HD.

Canon DVcam
Pent 2.4
512 ram
ATI video card

Somebody help me out here.

Mike

[pbhalerao]

Mike, I use the Hollywood DV Bridge to FireWire to capture from my Hi-8 cam. I have also tried out my friend's Sony DCR-TRV-330E Digital8 cam to capture directly via FireWire. I used ULead VideoStudio 5 to capture.

Using both options the capture quality was very good. I captured at the maximum setting (DV level). I used TMPGEnc to encode to mpeg1 for VCD. The expected loss was obvious but that was because it was mpeg1. I used the ULead s/w to render it mpeg2 and there was no loss - at least none to my eyes.

I would recommend that you set the capture mode to capture at maximum resolution. Other than that, I have nothing to suggest.

[Will Hay]

I'm out.
Like others, I thought it wasa combination of veiwing interlaced stuff on the monitor and then having the wrong field order when encoding (A = analogue, B = DV).
It's clearly a capture issue but one question springs to mind as result; you can't use Vdub to capture DV, so how are you doing it?
I use Pinnacle Studio 8.5 to capture via firewire from my MiniDV Sony TRV14 and it's flawless (I'm sorry to say)
Will

[mike_in_sd]

Thanks again for the replies you guys.

I think I am going to just let it rest for now .. till I figure out what is going on. I am actually starting to think it is the viewers I using to look at the AVI file with .. like the real audio video viewer .. it looks real bad on there if I blow it up any at all. In Pennicle, the smaller window actually makes it look pretty good.

I think I will start to dive into some of the other aspects of the game, so I guess I will go to the authoring group and start asking questions there ..

Thanks a lot for the help

I am here to stay

Mike

[jdizzy40]

Will Hay is a "Smiths" fan. A lot of good information here guys. Thanks for the re-fresher course.

[Bob W]

I was new to this however I just got lucky I guess when I bought the AVerDVD EZmaker PCI capture card from CompUSA for a mere $10 ($40 with a $30 rebate). It comes with NeoDVD Standard software which actually does what it says. So with the Aver card/NeoDVD software plus the Sima CopyMaster from BestBuy that goes between your VCR and capture card all my VHS captures look every bit as good as the source tape.

[spectroelectro]

There's a way to tell whether it's your file viewer that's making the DV capture blurry, or the DV file itself.
Capture the DV file. Encode it to MPEG-2 using TMPG with CBR
8000. This is such a high bitrate the MPEG-2 artifacts go away.
Burn a test DVD.
Now open the test DVD in a program like PowerDVD or WinDVD.
Does it still look blurry?
It shouldn't. If it does, you've got a probelm with the DV file
itself, not hte viewer.
Viewing AVI files using Windows Media Player tends to produce
cummy results because the Windows media player is very basic.
It doesn't get rid of interlace artifacts and even on a 2.4 Ghz
computer handles fast motion poorly.
The acid test is how your DV file looks on DVD. Nothing else matters.

[Will Hay]

The acid test is how your DV file looks on DVD. Nothing else matters.

Yep, but when considering this extract of the original post...

When there is movement in the video it gets real fuzzy. Im talking on the computer monitor AND on the TV once it was made into a vcd/svcd

....things get complicated!
Will

[DrWafer]

read this:

http://www.100fps.com/

read to the end,and you will see that techology in use for digital capture is
decades back.

only with 50fps the motion will be fluid,but unfortunatelly the VCD,SVCD
standards still on 25fps.

[mike_in_sd]

On an ending note ..

I tried spectro's advice and Captured my DV, converted to mpeg2 using cbr 8000, and wrote to a dvd file which I played using Powerdvd.

It was still blurry during the fast moving scenes. The capture IS bad. It only happens during fast movement so I am not going to put my video hobby on hold while I stall on this one problem.

I have read on here, that a DV capture is effectively nothing more than copying the digital data to the hard drive (which makes sense to me ) so the problem itself doesn't make sense.

This is using two different capture methods ( dvraptor & firewire ) so the only thing common is the cpu which is very standard.

Pent 2.4 ( not overclocked )
512 meg ddr mem
64 meg ATI video card

[avuton]

I have exactly the same problem. VirtualDub isn't working and everything is messed up. It's not the ordinary kind of motion blur, so deinterlace doesn't do any good. It is not an interlacing problem.

Even AviCodec (a program telling specs of a clip) gave me an error message, but it showed the quality is 25% !! And that's low as we're talking about dv capture.

I don't know the solution. With ScenAlyzer I'm able to rewind the tape etc. but I just doesn't capture. The only programs so far are VideoStudio and the capture program with MediaStudio.

[ImaWeTodd]

mike:

What does the DV look like if you hook your camcorder up to your tv and play?

Not Blurry ?


Well then get a simple program like winDV from the tools section and capture via firewire, and then record using winDV back to another tape. Play it on your TV from your camcorder. Blurry ? Strange indeed. This is the simplest method I can think of to determine if the capture is causing a problem.

I went thru something like this and finally figured out it was my source.