Video capture and conversion

[chtim]

Hi, I don’t know whether this topic has been posted before. But currently I have problem in capturing video from Handycam to PC, especially for the video quality.
For your information, I’m using Sony 8mm Handycam, Video card Nvidia GeForce2MX-WinFast/Leadtek for capturing, PII-333 Mhz processor, 256 Mb memory and 30 Gb 7200 RPM Harddrive, software for capturing : AMCAP version 1.00 from Microsoft which is standard bundled package with the Video card. Can anyone in this forum help me how to increase the quality for this video capture ?
And also when I convert using VCD cutter from AVI to Mpeg, the process hang at the middle. Any one could help me ? Or suggest the good quality AVI to Mpeg convertion program.
Thanks in advance for your help.

[Shabubu]

Just warning you that you might get shouted at a little cause this forum is all about that topic

Anyway, get virtualdub or AVI_IO for capturing. Allows you to multi-segment capture (files greates than 2GB), and get a copy of either HUFFYUV or PicVideo MJPEG (capture codecs). I personally frameserve this captured file to panasonic encoder using avisynth though it's easier to use vdub, both of these frameservers will allow you to clean up the video with noise reduction, and cut out the bits you don't need. As you'll probably get a lot of tape hiss on the audio track, save out the audio to a WAV file using VDUB and use Cooledit to reduce the noise, then add it back to your video. Finally encode in your encoder of choise. All the guides for these are either here (look left) or at doom9.net