stupid resolution capture question

[shadowofanubis6]

I have a ATI pci wonder capture card, i bought it a year ago for like 40 bucks or something... it does a good job, and the max capture size is 740x280 i believe. What's the difference if i capture something iin 352x240 or 740x280? I plan to put the videos on a dvd eventually... but on the computer the quality looks nearly identical. Maybe im missing something.

[thecoalman]

I think you have the large resolution messed up, should be 720x480 anyhow...Depends on your source, VHS is not that high of a resolution therefore the you will not see that much of a difference especially if your source is low quality homemade video.

On the other hand if you captured some video from TV you will definitely see a difference in the final product when viewed on TV.

[shadowofanubis6]

The av cords go from my cable box directly to my capture card. And yeah i thought the resolution was messed up to but that's what it says in the selection for resolutions. I tried capturing something in "720x280" and it looked normal/verygood on my mointor so maybe it was a misprint by the program.

[spectroelectro]

One of the virtues of the ATI AIW is that it'll let you capture in a wide variety of resolutions, many of 'em non-standard. 352 x 480 is half d1, 720 x 480 is full d1, 352 x 240 is VCD resolution. Other resolutions are non-standard, like 720 x 240.

Bitrate proves crucial. If you cap in MPEG-2 with a solid decent bitrate like 3.5 to 4 megabits/sec, half D1 352 x 480 will look identical on your TV set in most cases to full D1 720 x 480. If you cap with 352 x 240 using MPEg-2 you can loweryour bitrate even burther can still get very good video quality.

Half D1 and full d1 and CCIR-601, 704 x 480, are native resoultion direclty supported by the DVD spec. Meaning you can import MPEG-2 video with these frame resolutions directly into a typical DVD authoring program and burn a DVD and it shoudl play on any DVD player.

352 x 240 MPEG-2 and 720 x 240 MPEG-2 are not directly supported by the DVD spec, so you'll have to play games with TMPGenc rewriting the file header (choose FILE -> TOOLS -> SIMPLE DEMULTIPLEX -> RE MULTIPLEX CUSTOM) to get it to play on DVD player and even then there's no guarantee.

Bottom line? Half d1 352 x 480 at around 4 megabits works extremely well for almost all video sources, will import direclty into any DVD authoring program worthy of the name, and looks identical to full D1 720 x 480 for most video sources on a standard TV set.