Problems capturing s-video w/Premiere 6.0 & ATI AIW Radeon

[tvc]

I'm trying to archive my old VHS/S-VHS tapes between 0.5 to 6 hours long in one-hour-long chunks in DivX 5.0 for archival to CDs (at least until I get a DVD burner). My intended workflow is to use either ATI TV or Premiere to trim the end capture bits and then use either Flask XMPEG or Premiere export for DivX output.

As it stands, I'm having a problem with my captures with Adobe Premiere 6.0 and an ATI Radeon AIW card. I know that the ATI card has a native MPEG-2 format it captures in. When I set to capture from Premiere, it captures video but it's basically uncompressed. The resulting video is over 1GB/minute with occasional frame drops, which is obviously not what I want. Every time I try to set the video compression "recompression" capture settings to DivX 5.0, they keep getting reset to "no recompression" and it's very frustrating as a result. In fact, the same resetting happens with audio and I can't compress the audio with the Radium MP3 codec during the capture.

If I instead use the ATI TV application to capture, Premiere doesn't recognize the MPEG-2 capture format and munges the video to boot. In fact, the scary thing is that when I use only ATI TV and FlaskXMPEG, the audio is just a bunch of noise, although the video is there, yet playing back the original captured video is ok (albeit jerky).

I know this question has been asked in a couple of other places, but I've never found a clear answer from ATI or Adobe or any one else. Can anyone give me some advice on how to fix or at least work around this?

My system config is as follows:
Athlon XP1800+ w/512MB DDR266
MSI K7T266 Pro2RU mobo
IBM Deskstar 60GXP 60GB 7200rpm apps/OS drive
Western Digital 1000BB 100GB 7200rpm dedicated capture-only drive
Plextor 24x10x40 IDE burner + Lite-On LTD-163 DVD-ROM
ATI Radeon AIW 32MB DDR
Soundblaster Audigy Platinum EX
3COM 3C905 NIC
Windows XP Pro
Adobe Premiere 6.0
ATI MMC 7.1

[Savant]

I don't use Adobe, but I know the ATI MMC (the 'tv' app) doesn't cature the audio in the right format. DVD standard is 48K but the ATI program captures at 44.1K instead. This MAY be causing your problem. To see if this is causing your problem you'll need to demux your vide stream and them convert the audio to the proper format and then mux it back together.

Regards,

Savant

[tvc]

Actually this isn't so much my problem. I just want to know how to capture video and audio inside Premiere with compression. Nobody seems to know what is happening. As it stands, I will never EVER recommend another ATI card for this purpose. ATI has been completely unresponsive, and it's no surprise given that 90% of the threads here are problems with ATI cards.

[Savant]

Actually ATI makes a great capure card if you KNOW how to handle them. Unfortunately they take a little more work, but once you get it working they work flawlessly. This sounds like a software problem, not a hardware problem.

I've been converting VHS to DVD for a couple months now and after the initial experimentation I'm not having any problem at all. If you're not going to be editing the video, why not try VirtualDub to capture video and set your codec settings there? Then if you have the same problem you'll know it is the codec and not the card.

Keep in mind that just because a codec is present doesn't mean it will work for capturing. If you can capture with other codecs then the software is the problem, not the hardware.

Try doing some experimenting with other codecs.

Regards,

Savant

[Mirror_Image]

MMC 7.6 is available from ATI for download, much much better than 7.1 (as far as I've seen, anyway).

[tvc]

That's the other problem - every time I try to upgrade the ATI drivers, WinXP gets its screen corrupted. MMC7.6 will probably kill the system.

The $64,000 question is this: why does Premiere not let me capture with the ATI card? I'm certain it's ATI's fault. At my earliest opportunity, I'm going to go buy a Canopus card. Until then, someone should know how to integrate this card's use with Premiere.

[Joe018]

I have the same problem with my asus v7700 deluxe. dang thing will capture at 720*480 with the nvidia wdm drivers and the mjpeg codec. but i cant get the capture settings for adobe to stick. i set up the settings. then i capture it? and it seems to do uncompressed even though the project settings to the right of the capture window show its goign to be used. ever figure this out?