New At Capturing -- Need Help!

Although I have made a VCD using my pretty old computer(p3 300 mhz, 2x cdrw , 10gb) but I am still a rookie. I have an ATI all in wonder pro capturing device and I am currently having a little trouble. When I capture using ATI software I have a humongous AVI file which is really bad quality and sometimes no audio. Will someone give me some basic info on how to capture something really nice and make a SVCD?? or just a VCD?? I know I'll need some top-notch software so can I have some names please??

[myke]

Are you still using your p3 300mhz computer? If you are good luck trying to get something good and compressed at the same time. I don't mean to sound negative. I had a p3 500 with an all in wonder 128. I could only get decent captures in an uncompressed avi format. Of course what I mean as decent could be different then what you mean. I used virtual dub witch is free. I tried many others but virtual dub seem to do the best job. You can get virtual dub or a link on where to download it by clicking on TOOLS to the left <====
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I then would reencode the avi file to an MPEG file to compress it using TMPGENC get it at http://www.tmpgenc.com which took along time depending on the length of my capture. I used the highest quality setting for motion estimation in TMPGENC.
I have recently upgraded my motherboard and processor to a 1.3ghz AMD Thunderbird. I can now capture in an MPEG1 format without dropping frames Using the same All in Wonder card and the newest Multimedia Center 7.5 from ATI. Granted it probably isn't as good as capturing to AVI and then converting it to Mpeg using TMPGENC but it's faster and the video loss is acceptable anyway to me. If you are running into files getting to large while capturing you might need to more hard-drive space. I have a 60gig hard drive now but I had a 27gig and it wasn't enough for me. To record a 100 min uncompressed video I used over 31 gig of my hard-drive. If you're not using NTFS file system which Windows XP and Windows 2000 support you're going to run into file size limitations also. Capturing video with the speed of processor you have may be difficult getting good results of I used a p3 500 so I wouldn't know about a 300. I would try by capturing something short under 5 min then see if you like it. Then convert it to an MPEG1 VCD format using TMPGENC another freeware program. If you like what you see then try capturing to a compressed avi format(like Divx or Indeo Codec) Again Look to the Left under TOOLS or http://www.doom9.org also has codecs you can download or links to them. The ATI software you are using is why you're losing audio. The processor can't handle all the audio and video data so it drops the Audio to try and keep up with the Video. My guess is if it is real poor quality all the video data isn't being processed either so it drops information to try and keep up.You might try lowering your frame rate(instead of 29.97 fps you might try 15fps) so you aren't dropping video frames or try lowering the size of the video frames(instead of 352x240 you might try 320x240 or even smaller) I hope this helps.

The nuts and bolts of all this is if you don't have a fast processor you might try A 7200 rpm Large hard-drive to compensate and spend hours converting your movie or home video.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: myke on 2001-12-31 02:54:08 ]</font>