Capturing VHS to SVCD

[fergums]

I am new to this and anyone experienced will laugh at what I did. I got the Dazzle DVC 50 and converted a 2hr vhs onto SVCD but the quality was deplorable. It dropped 10,000 frames on my Athlon 1600+ 512mb ram machine.

My question is should I get a better quality Dazzle DVC or a good video card with VIVO? I have a GForce MX-400 64mb card now.

[theDruid]

fergums,

I don't know much about Dazzle capture cards, but are you saying you capture straight to MPEG2/SVCD format?

Is that with bundled Dazzle software?

As I say, I've only done a bit of VHS capture myself, but I find I get good results by capturing to a low-compression codec such as Huffy, then re-encoding to MPEG afterwards.

Otherwise, the PC is having to do a lot of work to take the video input and convert it to a high-compression format like MPEG2 in realtime.

Let us know a little more about the software/process you've used.

cheers,
mcdruid.

[fergums]

Sorry, big oversight by me.

I do not use any Dazzle software. I use Pinnacle's Studio 8. I used the best quality available in Studio for the Dazzle product. I create an mpeg2 SVCD and then go to Nero v5 and burn a SVCD playable on my Pioneer DVD player.

[theDruid]

Again, I don't know anything about Pinnacle!

However, I'd suggest trying capturing to a different format - can Pinnacle capture to an avi using external codecs? If it can, try installing Huffy (tools section), and give that a go. You'll need a lot of discspace, but it means your PC can concentrate on not dropping frames during capture, and then take its time over the number-crunching of encoding later on.

If Pinnacle can't do it, there are lots of capturing apps (tools section again), including VirtualDub. I don't know if VDub will support your Dazzle DVR50 though.

Once you've got a big avi file, you can encode with something like TMPGEnc to MPEG, and then use Nero to burn your (S)VCD.

Someone who knows more (i.e. anything! ) about Dazzle & Pinnacle might be able to offer some more specific advice!

cheers,
mcdruid.

[Allan55]

It dropped 10,000 frames

This sounds like hardware/OS problems or bad tape/VCR problems.

Don't capture to the system drive. Defrag your drive(s).

FF, rewind a few times.

Research further in the "capture" forum.

Allan

[j1d10t]

fergums, this may be a stupid question, but I noticed that you are using WinXP, and with the number of dropped frames I couldn't help but wondering; do you have Windows set to compress your HDs to make more room? You may not, but if they are compressed, that can cause a major problem with dropped frames when capturing. I've got Studio 8, and I've never had problems capturing directly to MPEG2, to any size/resolution/bit rate. If have to capture to MPEG2, I would suggest capturing to a higher bit rate than normal SVCD, and then re-encoding with TMPGEnc, or CCE.

[fergums]

I have 2 hard drives, 1 dedicated for video 40gb (small now I realize but good in 2001) and neither is compressed. I think the problem was with the capture device. It went through usb 1.1 and only captured mpeg1 at 350x240.

The computer shop I bought the computer has suggested a product that may work - AVerMedia DVD EZMaker PCI. Their website says it can capture mpeg2 at 720x480. He also suggested getting the ATI all in wonder radeon 7500 with VIVO.

Here is some info on this product. http://aver.com/products/AVerDVEZMaker.pdf

[Varmit]

Best advice anyone can give you is return that dazzle piece of doodoo and buy a real capture device like a canopus 100 or one of the other firewire type analog to digital video converters. I tried all the dazzle products and was never happy with the quality. I bought a Canopus 100 and use tmpgenc to convert to VCD/SVCD (and soon to DVD).. best solution out there..