Captured video-shining line at screen bottom

[arrowhead]

I just bought an AVerMedia DVD EZMaker PCI card with neoDVD standard4 software. The video I captured from my analog camcorder and VCR has a shining line at the bottom of screen. What causes this problem, the hardware or the software? Anyway to solve it?

Thanks

[redwudz]

Depends how big the line is. If it's a thin line at the very bottom of the screen, that is usually related to the VHS player, a common problem. TV uses overscan and this doesn't show up on a TV set, just on a computer monitor. You can crop it out, but I would try it on a TV set first, if that's it final destination.

[non-linear]

This is normal for any VHS source and like redwudz said, it doesn't typically show up on a TV set. You could crop it out, but if you're going to author it to DVD, I wouldn't recommend doing that since when you play it back on DVD, you'll lose some of the visible picture at the bottom (since the very bottom of the video is in the underscan, the bottom part that was visible on the VHS would then be down in the underscan). If you plan on using the video on both DVD and PC, you can mask the line using TMPGEnc and put a black mask over the line.

[bugster]

Removing the line by either cropping or masking is advisable (IMHO) because it uses up precious bitrate, leaving less for the rest of the picture and so reducing overall quality.

[arrowhead]

I tried to play the captured video(VCD) on TV, and the line became almost, if not complete, invisible.
Is it realy true that the captured video has to have a line? Or is it possible a good capture device will not produce the line at all? I took the same Hi8 tape to my friend and used his Sony digital camcorder to tansfer video to computer. The result was perfect and didn't have the line at the bottom. I am not sure if my capture card is not good enough. Does someone have a better card which not generating the shining line?

In case to crop and mask, I think I know how to mask using TMPGEnc, but not sure how to crop. Can you please give some advice?

Thanks.

[Gazorgan]

Use VDUB and mask it with black...helps with other TV's.

[barrybear]

The lines that you refer to are the head switcing points between the 2 heads on the pickup drum. They have to apeare there as the sync pulse occurs at the bottem of the frame and if the switching points were not visible and ocured during the sync pulse period then the sync would be disrupted and cause frame bounce. A normaly ajusted tv will scan this line beyond the visible area on the screen.