Broken edges in motion scenes

[calvert99]

I am fairly new to capturing (trying to get back into it), and I'm looking for some help.
I'm using an Osprey 200 capture card with Huffy codec and Virtual Dub. In most cases where there is alot of motion in a scene, the edges of objects/people will be broken lines. How can I fix this?
I capture at 640x480...because this is the highest resolution it will let me select. Is the problem with my capture card? I know nothing about which chipset it uses. Do I need to be able to capture at a higher resolution for turning VHS to DVD?
My system is: Athalon XP1900 , 512 MB DDR , 60 gig HD , Windows XP.
I appreciate any help.

[BSR]

What you are seeing, I'm assuming, are interlaced lines.
https://www.videohelp.com/glossary?I#Interlace
This is normal, you will not see them on your TV. Try a search and read about it, many people ask.

If the highest you can capture is 640x480, I recommend capturing at it and then resizing down to 352x480 so that you are DVD compliant. Do not upsize your video to 704(720)x480, don't think it will look good, heard a lot of no nos about upsizing.

[Capmaster]

It doesn't sound like a resolution issue. It sounds like a capture bitrate issue ...and it's not normal to see that if your bitrate is high enough.

Odd that the Osprey 200 datasheet doesn't mention bitrate:

http://www.videomediasolutions.com/OS200datasheet.pdf

The card captures in non DVD-compliant resolution, and offers no way to change the bitrate?

Reading the manufacturer's description, it sounds like this card was designed for quick and easy web video streaming. The 640 x 480 res is a clue also. That's a PC monitor resolution, not a TV or DVD resolution. It's not designed for high-quality DVD video capture.

I'd get rid of the card and get a decent (DVD-compatible) card Check the capture card link under "Lists" to the left.

[jimmalenko]

To me, it sounds like you may be having field order problems ...... but I could be wrong.

Try swapping the field order from top field first to bottom field first or vice-versa.

[calvert99]

I have played around with it some more, changing field order, etc. The only thing that seems to cure the problem is to drop the capture resolution to 1/2 (320x240). Since I am sure this is an unacceptable res for converting to DVD, it looks like a different capture card is in order.
I know this has been asked a bazillion times, but ...does anyone here recommend a certain card for AVI capture?
One of the things that I liked about the Osprey card, when I was shopping a couple years ago, was the fact that it also captures the audio. I haven't had any audio sync problems, like I have read that a lot of people have. Should I be looking for a card that caps audio also?
One of the cards from the list I may check into is the Avermedia DVD EZmaker, though it doesn't actually cap audio. It seems there is a wide varying in the reviews for any given card (one says it's junk...another says it's the greatest).
An ATI with the Cinema chip seems to be touted by a few, but it seems that they are all on their AIW cards...and I don't need a graphics card. It seems kind of a waste when I already have an Nvidia Geforce 3.

[junkmalle]

Your 480 line captures are fine for DVD as long as you get the field order right. The problem stems from the fact that television is not 29.97 frames per second, it's 59.94 fields per second. You never see two fields at the same time. The computer on the other hand joins two fields together to make a full frame -- since the two fields were taken at different points in time anything that moves will show the comb-like interlacing artifacts you are seeing. When you burn the file to a DVD it will playback as fields again so there will be no problem -- unless you create the DVD with the wrong field order. Any other capture card will do the exact same thing. Just make a DVD from your captured video -- you'll see it plays back fine on TV.

[BSR]

Can you post a screen shot of what you are seeing in Vdub?

[calvert99]

Here are a couple of screenshots...two consecutive frames. These are AVI caps from VHS using Huffyuv, with no filters or anything.
(I originally screenshot these in PNG format, but I had to convert them to JPEG to get below the 150k limit to post.)


[/img]

[calvert99]

I guess I can't attach more than one image per post...here is the next shot.

[/img]

[calvert99]

I have another question...
In my capture card settings, there is a choice for "Proportions (Pixel Aspect Ratio)". The two choices are "Standard (square pixels)", and "CCIR601". What does this mean?
With "standard", I can only achieve 640x480 captures, but with "CCIR601", full screen capture is 720x480.
I also found that the chipset in this Osprey is the Conexant Bt878...if that matters for anything.

[junkmalle]

You're captures are prefectly normal. If you want to understand what's going on, this page has an explanation of the issues involved (interlace, 3:2 pulldown, inverse telecine, deinterlacing):

http://www.doom9.org/ivtc-tut.htm

If your final destination is TV you don't need to do anything except ignore the interlace artifacts on the computer. If you want something that plays well on the computer you can either use a player that supports deinterlacing on the fly, inverse telecine the video back to the original film frames, or deinterlace (worst choice).

If your final destination is DVD you should record at 720x480. 640x480 isn't a valid frame size for DVD -- you'd have to resize it after capturing, a time consuming step.

There are some issues with BT chipsets. Some don't capture very well at certain resoultions. You may need to capture at a particular size and scale later to get the best results. Search this site for others who use the BT878.

[BSR]

Yes I agree, the captures look normal for interlaced video.
And yes if you can capture at 720x480, or 704x480, do it.

[calvert99]

It looks like my card will be fine.
I test burned a dvd-rw with about 12 different capture and encoding variations of the same clip to see which settings would look best. I encoded them as if they were 1 1/2 hour videos to see how the bit-rate affected the outcome. Capturing at 720x480 (Virtual Dub), and then encoding to Mpeg 2 (TMPGenc Plus) at 720x480 with a light noise filter, 2-pass VBR (8000 max, 6000 avg, 4000 min), and high quality motion search returned amazing results. This will work great for converting family home videos. I am going to wait for dual layer to become a little more standardized (hopefully soon) before I convert my commercial videos. This way, I won't have to compromise as much. 8)
Sorry if I wasted anyones time (and bandwidth) on a simple problem like the interlace lines. I had read about them previously, but I just didn't expect them to show up so prominently.
I do have a question now concerning authoring. I hope you same knowledgable folks hang out in that part of the forum too.
Thanks for all the help.