Decent analog capture

[blidge]

I'm trying to capture analog video at a decent quality without any success! I wish to convert my camcorder footage from VHS to DVD/VCD/SVCD but can't seem to capture anything of decent quality.

My setup is:-

1Ghz PIII, 128mb, 40gig hdisk running ME
Flyvideo Capture Card

Ultimately I want to be able to capture at the best quality possible before encoding to DVD/VCD but the results are poor. If I capture at 640 x 480 I get combing effects (particularly on moving images). These are softened but don't dissapear when encoded to mpeg format. Similar happens if I lower the capture res. My understanding is that I should attempt to capture at the highest resolution possible without getting dropped frames but the quality is very poor.

I've tried using VirtualDub and used the advice under the capture guides on VCDHELP.COM but if I try to select a resolution over 320 x 240 within VirtualDub it says it is an invalid format. Now VirtualDub crashes the PC whenever I try to select AVI capture before I can change any capture settings! I also use VideoStudio 5 and since this happened in VirtualDub it now occurs as soon as I go to the capture settings there too!

Anyone got any ideas / suggestions as to how I can make my system fully functional again and also the best way to get good quality captures?

I feel like my system should be able to capture at good quality so am I doing something fudamentally wrong? If not is there a reasonably cheap (up to £100) alternative software or hardware solution that I should look at that would make the operation of good quality capture painless?

Any advice much appreciated!

[stanwebber]

you'll never get acceptible results transfering vhs > vcd. too little picture detail is left after discarding/blending one of the fields. i'd recommend svcd at 352x480, or even dvd bitrates for that matter still at 352x480. if your dvdplayer is svcd capable it shouldn't have any problems with the non-standard resolution(actually half d-1)

[Anonymous65]

You can get perfect results going from VHS to VCD! VCD has about the same resolution as VHS video tape. You need to have the knowledge about video to do it right. You need to know what interlacing is, field order, color resolution, frame resolution for NTSC or PAL, frame rates, lossless compression, lossy compression and on and on. Spend a few days reading messages from people that have gone through it before, and learned how to make the best VCDs. If you learn how to do it, you can make great looking VCD's.

[stanwebber]

vcd has a little over half the resolution of vhs. the only reason it even approaches vhs quality is because the pixels are not rectangular, but square. my god man, vhs > vcd transfers look like crap no matter what

[N0SoopForU]

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: N0SoopForU on 2001-11-12 10:29:26 ]</font>

[TheInformer]

Blidge, here's what you do:

Go to http://www.geocities.com/lukesvideo/
Luke's site has a nice set of tutorials/instructions on capturing.
Starting with "Making the Video", read through them and then try to encode again.

[Anonymous65]

Discussion pointless!
Transfer your VHS to DVD - hopefully that will give you the resolution you need, otherwise convert the VHS to HD.

[dirk67]

Try this: capture at 352x576 (PAL) or 352x480 (NTSC). Then use the following VirtualDub filters: dynamic noise reduction, smart deinterlace, resize to 352x288(240). Frameserve to TMPGEnc.