Capturing...

[Jella]

Hi, I could use some recommendations... I've been trying to create an svcd out of my wedding video, but while I can handle the authoring part so-so, the problem is the capturing. Previously the problem was that my WinTV card only allowed me to capture video @ 320x240, which looked shitty when blown up to 480x480. I posted here about it and someone suggested I get the hacked drivers for the bt878 card, and yeah, it works just fine, now I can capture at any res I please. However, when I capture at 640x480, I seem to keep getting a lot of dropped frames, as the end result video has little twitches now and then and the sound breaks up during those twitches. I am wondering if there is anything I can do to help this? I have been capturing the video uncompressed, straight to AVI with no compression. Is there a reasonable alternative? Capturing 320x240 to uncompressed AVI was bad enough, hard drive space -wise, but 640x480 really takes a lot of space...we're only talking about like 25 minutes of video, so....

Any suggestions would be most welcome.

I use WinTV with Adobe Premiere to capture, the system's a Dell 4400 (P4 @ 1.6 GHz) with about 400 megs of RAM and 45 gigs of HD.

[housepig]

try capturing with Huffyuv compression - it's really light, but is definitely smaller than uncompressed, and gives me really good quality.

you can also try MJPEG compression at quality setting 18 or 19 (out of 20) - seems to be the most popular Huffy alternative for high-quality avi capture.

if your capture software won't let you choose those codecs after you install them, get more robust capture app! VirtualDub is super popular (and free!), my card doesn't like it, so I've used Virtual VCR (freeware) and iuVCR (cheap).

but you are using premiere, so you shouldn't have a problem. you might try another capture app anyway, any of the ones I suggested will be leaner than premiere, so that might free up some system overhead that premiere is using (aside from the resources it's using to capture).