Basic knowledge

[Lilltjalle]

Hi all,

A few things I don't understand:

When capturing video using Tv-tuner ( Pinnacle PCTV Pro ), there's a few different choices. Capture as VCD, SVCD or DVD.
In the end I wanna burn these captured videos onto a DVD.
What choice would be smart here ? VCD, SVCD or DVD ?

I tried, the other day, to burn a DVD and the video was captured as DVD at the beginning. The result was awful, looked really bad on my standalone DVD-player...

Put easier, what's the most simple way to solve this without loosing video quality ?

Software I'm using so far: Pinnacle Studio 8, DVD MovieFactory, Nero.

Please help, I don't get this...

[rsuave5]

what youll have to do is research this site. in the mean while mess with your settings and try to get it right. i capture 720x480 with a bitrate of 7500. can you set your own custom? try 720x480 and aftercapture take a look. you have to find the right mixture of settings

[Lilltjalle]

Yep, I can choose custom settings.
I've been reading this forum long enough to make my eyes bleed, but something is not right when I'm working with my captured videos.

They look really nice when viewing them on my computer, but after putting them on a DVD...well...the rest is a big laugh...
Well, that's life when you're a newbie, I guess...

Thanks anyway, I'll keep on trying.

[hwoodwar]

I suspect you are capturing strait to MPEG-2 format (for your SVCD and DVD settings) At least with SVCD (not positive about DVD) usually this produces a lesser quality MPEG file than capturing to avi format and then re-encoding to SVCD compliant MPEG-2 file in either TMPGenc or CCE. Re-encoding does take additional time and the length of time it takes is very dependent on processor speed.

[Lilltjalle]

Affermative.

So capturing should be in AVI format then ?

Well...AVI, is that MPEG1 then ?

I've been trying out some thing different settings since the last posting but no matter what I do, it won't fit onto one single DVD-disc.

I must be missing something here...

[bugster]

Affermative.

So capturing should be in AVI format then ?

Well...AVI, is that MPEG1 then ?

...

No AVI is not mpeg-1.
AVI is just a file format for storing audio and video (Audio Video Interleave). The way the audio and video are compressed within that file can be almost anything. For best quality capture you want a lossless codec like huffyuv or a low loss codec like motion jpeg. Beware though, the files can huge. A Huffy capture at DVD resolutions is about 60Gb for an hour of video!

Get the codecs from to tools section or read some of the capturing guides in the capture section linked on the left.