Capturing in realtime

[Hamalek]

I was looking at different capture cards that I could buy, but I couldn't figure out what type. The biggest difference I have found is that some capture in "realtime" while others do not. Can someone explain to me what capturing in realtime is and why that might be beneficial (time saver?). I would greatly appreciate any advice you could give. Thanks!

[procrastination]

When you say some cards advertise "real time" are you perhaps talking about a dazzle card, or Matrox card?

If so, then its actually advertising Real Time Effects previews.

If it truly says "real time capture" then they might be talking about something on one of the all in wonder cards or VCR cards, meaning that as you watch it on your computer you can pause, and so forth. I have not seen too much benifit from any of this.

My suggestion as far as capture cards go is to buy a TV Wonder VE. Its only 45 bucks (or less) and can do most things. No TV output, but most people these days just want to capture VHS, edit, and output to VCD.

If you like it, and want to do more, then it would be worth spending more cash on another card.

late

PRO

[2ZOD.COM]

Real time capture doesn't neccarily mean you can just simply pause the input. It means you can save it to your hard drive in digital form and it only takes as long to do this as the video is.

This is a time-saver, but supposedly it's very processor intensive and isn't recommended for slow computers (anything lower than 1ghz in my book).

If the card advertises "real time capture" and "onboard MPEG-2/1 encoder" then you're in business. With one of these you can save the movie in real time, so it only takes as long to watch it, to save it to your hard drive through the onboard dv encoder. This won't be as processor intensive because a lot of the processing will be done with the PCI card rather than the processor.


Hope that helps,
Carl

[Hamalek]

The cards I am talking about that do this are these: Canopus Amber, Canopus DV Storm 2, One Point DVDEdit Plus DV, Pinnacle DV500 These apparently have realtime encoders that encode into MPEG1/MPEG2. The cards are much more expensive but I was curious if they were big time savers because time is an issue to me. If there isn't any big difference I will just get a normal DV/firewire card.

[2ZOD.COM]

Yeah, those cards should do what you're looking for.

Although, people have said that when you hardware encode through the card the quality isn't as good. I would assume the quality is pretty damn good when you're paying $400+ for a card though, so I would say it's really up to you.

They should be time savers because it only takes as long as the video to encode it. 10 minute video = 10 minutes to capture, if you use encoder it's going to take much longer. Like 10 minutes = 2 hours. (although it depends on processor speed and other specs)

Don't go exactly by what I said though, I don't know that much about this. My little bit of ranting here shouldn't influence a purchase of 400+ dollars.


Sorry.

[Hamalek]

So I guess the question seems to be which produces better quality for your money and which takes the least amount of time, hardware encoding or software encoding with the above cards in mind. I need other opinions...is the quality lestened if you use a capture card that encodes in realtime? I am looking for the best quality with the least amount of time to make it. Any and all comments are helpful, thanks

(The system I will be using:
Win XP
1.4 GHZ P4
over a Gig of Ram
and a fairly big HD)

[bobmeyer]

get an averdvd ezmaker card. it encodes to mpeg 1 and mpeg 2 in three differant speeds. best, better + good.

[txpharoah]

If you want to save money, go for anything made by ATI or Canopus. Lower prices, but not really lower quality.

Avoid all Pinnacle and other brands. They are cheap. And I mean more than just low prices. Great big "yuck" on quality.

If you have money, buy either the high-end Canopus or Matrox cards.

I have ATI AIW 7500 and have access to a Canopus DV Storm 2 and a Matrox RTMac. They are all nice, if you know how to use a video card. Just look around these forums for hep on setting, or make a post.

[Hamalek]

Thanks for the help

[pharlap]

I'll put my ten cents in and say if your capturing from VHS tape any capture card will do like $20 worth and check it has a connexant chipset on board they will capture real time on your machine , no problems

[SHS]

Keep in mind that there 3 type of REALtime encoder
Option1: Software MPEG Encoding
Option2: Hardware MPEG Encoding
Option3: AVI/DV recoding but there host Hardware MPEG encoding chip it uselee ref to as non-linear setup and have export the clip to mpeg which is rendering in realtime encoding it uselee come with adobe premiere like in case of Pinnacle DV500 which by the way is not a time-saver end up take 2x longer ocen you master premiere vs a REALtime Hardware MPEG encoding like Canopus Amber, WinTV-PVR 250/350, Dazzle DVC2, etc.

Ho and the DVDEdit Plus DV is half bake card in fact it not all that much diff from ProVideo PV256 which dosen't rec audio in realtime.
Canopus DV Storm 2 is not REALtime it fall in line with Option3 and may end having to buying the StormEncoder to get export rendering in realtime encoding that depend on DV Storm 2 kit you get some with some don't so beware of that.

[gf]

I would spend the extra money and buy a Canopus card. Unlike ATI, it will not drop frames and video/audio sync loss. I have a All in Wonder Radeon with a AMD XP +1800, and the video drops frames. I tried this card on 2 different motherboards. Both boards with 2) 7200 rpm 30 Gb drives in a raid 0 config. I'm going to buy a Canopus MRV1000.

[txpharoah]

On ATI dropping: I'd say that you should be sure to disconnect your network/internet, DSL/cable and close any open (or system tray) programs. Otheriwse, yes it drops. I close my system down to only capturing, and no more frame drops.

On the cards: Yes, buy the full Canopus setup with the MPEG encoder, not just the basics. Or try an ATI 7500/8500/9700 card. If you want something good, make sure you spend at least $200. I know of no card above this amount that is bad, but plenty below it that are not worth two cents. You really get what you pay for. Those Pinnacle and Dazzle may have lots of goodies, but the encodes just look blah.

[neomaine]

gf,

Couple of things:

1 - I've got an ATI AIW Radeon that I first started with an Athlon 1200 and now is on an Athlon XP 1800+. Only OCCASIONAL to NO frame drops. Regular defrags, quiet system, current drivers and capturing to a non-OS drive help a great deal. But that's true for most cards and capture apps.

2 - MMC 8.1 could / should fix many issues. Wonderfull app. Yah, it took awhile but ATI got it right on this one from my standpoint. Always captured to huffyuv and encoded to vcd w/ tempgenc. Now I go straight to DVD at 2.5mbs avg with 4mbs max with great results and perfect sync. VideoSoap (capture/view filters) looks to potentially cleanup any minor flaws in the video. Still playing with it.

3 - Raid 0 is really meant for physical backup of a disk, like your OS drive, in case it goes bad. Or, meant for high read environments where two read I/Os can be performed at the same time. Its horrible at writes, good for reads depending on your OS or hardware. Depending on the cache involved on the drives (which will be max'd quickly on a capture regarless) it will wait for both drives to acknowledge the write. Either way, definitely not good for write intensive process like capturing.

[Bluez]

people giving loads of advice, but the real question is: what do you want to capture and what is the end medium?

[CogoSWSDS]

I don't have the hardware to do hardware MPEG encoding; off-line (ie nonrealtime) software encoding usually turns out better than realtime software encoding, at least according to the folks here (I don't have software to do realtime either - I'm too cheap... ) Here's what I can do with my P4 1.4GHz computer and an hour of video

Capture 60 minutes of video to AVI - 1:00
Encode to 1150kbps CBR mpeg1 - 1:30
Author and burn (if no fancy stuff) - 0:20
------
2:50

So less than 3 hours and I can have a 1 hour VCD. Of course if I'm doing fancy stuff it takes longer...like I spent parts of 3 days editing my daughter's Christmas program before I spent an hour and a half encoding it to MPEG for burning to CD. And if I use TMPGEnc's 2-pass VBR the encoding step is roughly doubled.

CogoSWSDS

[fingernailX]

I have 2 ATI AIW cards, a SigmaDesigns DVR, a BT878 card with several realtime soft encoders and have access to several pinnacle cards at work including a DV500 and Targa 3000. Unless you capture hardware encoding at 8Mbps or better, software reencode looks better everytime. For everything I've seen, in order to get 2 hrs on a DVD+-R you need to capture in mjpeg, dv, yuv or high bitrate mpeg2 i-frame only and then reencode with CCE, Tmpgenc or MainConcept to around 4.5 Mbps. I can do 1 pass with CCE or MainConcept in about realtime reencode with a 2.8 ghz processor. I've not seen any realtime hardware not create macroblocking in high motion without high bitrate. If someone has the magic bullet please tell us.

[SHS]

Hmm that funny I'm doing a full 2 hours at 6MB with VBR on but audio is set 224k and video I have rec look dran on 50" Big screen
How ever doing VHS tape can be a pain a@@