What size Hard Drive?

[statuspending]

why spend the money on two forty gig drives and still have to spend all that time encoding? you're much better off not buying a crumby capture card, since you're not guaranteed good avi capture with it anyways. compgeeks is one of my favorite shops, but i'd go with the dazzle digital video creator. connects through usb and records directly to mpegs! it even has templates so you can rec to svcd format, and then burn. pretty damn cool i think.

do a search for "dazzle usb" on http://www.pricewatch.com
i think it runs about 160 chalupas.


anyone have any experience with it?

[H@Mouse]

It sounds like he wants a little more quality than something like the USB Dazzle can put out... this card will do him a ton better than anything but a DVC II with the PCI encoder card which is still rather pricey. Then again, provided you don't mind the post-processing time, the software MPEG2 and even SVCD results will simply outclass even the DVC II.

If he goes MJPEG straight from the card, it'll be comparable to a DVC II, but still at a much lower price. (I NEED to try MJPEG myself here soon... should work quite well for what I'd like to do.)

Also, regarding the sound problem... make sure under window's "volume control", you have the recording source set to line input enabled! I missed this the first go at it. The microphone worked fine, but I could never get an audio signal from the VCR for some reason. (Oops!)

- H@

[32bituser]

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On 2001-07-03 12:36:19, H@Mouse wrote:
Also, regarding the sound problem... make sure under window's "volume control", you have the recording source set to line input enabled! I missed this the first go at it. The microphone worked fine, but I could never get an audio signal from the VCR for some reason. (Oops!)
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Thanks H@,
That did it for the sound. Yes, I am hoping to get a little better qual than the average "all-in-one" type card, and your review of the Cyber was what made me decide to try it!

I will be trying som encoding tonight, and will be back tomorrow with more questions when I screw it up...

[H@Mouse]

Well, then, good luck to you!

I had my share of mistakes when I was first setting it all up. Had some good background research ahead of time to lead me a little from this site though... these forums are wonderful.

If you absolutely have to have just about the cleanest imaging frame by frame, you can't beat raw input from a PCI card... a device with hardware-only output is nice for saving some time, but still frames just never can look as good. (You've probably guessed - I'm saving off raw stills and short video clips and the basic CyberMail AV card is GREAT for it.)

BTW: "Computer Geeks" has now sold out of the basic cards as well as the kit with the stock CCD camera and microphone. They still have a few cards with a higher quality camera though.

- H@

PS: If you're going to try raw (well, YUY2 anyway) recording on one drive, it's going to be tough going above 480x480! VERY FEW DRIVES can maintain the necessary rate as they capture into the last 1/2 or 1/3 of the drive... some nearly lose half their highest transfer rate! You'll need an MJPEG codec or else go for a RAID split-drive setup!

[32bituser]

Well,
I can now capture 480W x 352H with zero frame drop using VirtualDub and PicVideo MJPEG compression (provided that I do the capture right after boot-up, if I do other stuff first, then the capture is unpredictable). The resulting AVI's look marvelous!

Next, I need to encode the results to SVCD format for burning with Nero.

Any suggestions on TMPGEnc settings/tweaks? I currently have the demo version of Nero, and will purchase the full version if it works as expected.

Thanks again!

[Stansell]

I have a 40gig hard drive that is dedicated to AVI capture only and I can capture over 2 hours using HuffYUV with room for the MPEG SVCD files.

So, I don't think 2 40G hard drives are really needed if the most you wish to record is 2 hours.

If I need to record more than 2 hours I use PicMJPEG on Quality setting 18. But I do prefer to keep the absolute best quality I can and use HuffYUV.

I guess you could say I added an external 40G hard drive to my system also - a DirecTV with Tivo (35 hours of recording). It makes it easier to "buffer" my recordings and capture to my computer later.