VHS capture ...what quality can i expect

[efiste2]

ive got a hauppage winTV capture card in a 2.6ghz atlohn 2.1 ghz with 256 mb ram (soon to be 512) and i'd like to see if anyone could tell me what results i can expect from a VHS video onto a DVD , I realise its quite a hard question to answer but any help would be most appreciated ie the best and EASIEST software to use etc etc

[housepig]

opinions will vary widely.

I would say that, if you capture as an avi with a low-compression codec such as Huffyuv or PicVideo MJPEG, and encode to mpeg-2 afterwards with a decent bitrate, your video will be as crisp and clean as your source.

this will, of course, depend on your source, the type of video you are capturing (live action vs. animation), the quality of your vcr, etc. etc.

I like capturing with iuVCR, editing with Virtualdub, encoding with TMPG and authoring with DVD Lab. Titles, effects and compositing are done with Sony Vegas.

[Ejoc]

Yea I agree, basicly in a best case situation your DVD would be equal to the VHS, it will be alittle worse since it's going to compress the video, but it wont really be that noticeable if you use Huffyuv and a high bitrate for the MPEG-2. It will also help to capture in the resolution you will be using for the DVD. So if you are making a 720x480 resolution DVD, capture at 720x480, and if you are planning on making your DVD 352x480 capture at that.

I have and use PicVideo MJPEG, but if you want quality I'd go with Huffyuv, I can notice a difference, except for quality setting 20, which I think is doing the same compression as huffyuv, I've captured the same length clips in both, and at quality 20 the file sizes were exactly the same.

[Thorn]

Assuming you select encoding software that has good quality, the biggest quality factor is your VCR. If you're not satisfied with the VHS quality read some posts about TBC (time based correctors) or at least make sure you use a good VCR.

You're going to need to do some experimentation, especially if you want to cut corners that won't affect the video quality too much for you. I'd suggest always capturing at 720x480 and encoding to the same resolution, unless the quality looks good enough for you at lower resolutions. Many argue that this is overkill, but at least try things the long way before settling on a quick solution that drops the quality a lot.