I need some help determining the right capture settings.

[Bluesman461]

I bought the ati tv wonder usb 2.0 setup so that I could capture football games and put them on dvd this season. I've tested it on a few games from vhs tapes just to get used to running it and editing the final product. I am having a difficult time finding the optimum settings for recording live tv though.

I just need to record 2 hours 45 minutes worth since that is what the length without commercials or halftime show is. Right now I am recording way too high and compressing way too much in dvd shrink and it shows on the dvd. I suppose I could sit here for a few days and test this out multiple times but I was just wondering if anyone had some good settings for said length with ati's multimedia center. I'm trying to get the dvd's to look as close to a live tv broadcast as possible. Thanks for any help.[/u]

[Mister Flonk-Flonk]

I use 4Mbps VBR and shoot for trimming the video closer to 2:30 then if it's over by much I use DVD-Rebuilder with CCE 2.5 instead of DVDShrink to make it fit. It doesn't look as good as the original does because you have to re-encode it, but in my opinion it looks better capped at 4Mbps for a full D1 frame recompressed to fit than it would if it were originally capped at a lower bitrate for a full D1 frame. Some stuff you can get away with using a little lower bitrate, but fast motion, high detail interlaced video like sports footage will look usually like crap at less than 4Mbps. The alternative is to use a half D1 frame. If the games go to overtime I usually re-encode to half D1.

My $.02

[Richard_G]

Capture at half D1 (352 x 480 if NTSC) and encode at a bitrate of around 3500 - 4000 kbs. That will give you just under 3 hours per DVD. The quality will be pretty good with very few artifacts, although it might look very slightly soft.

[lordsmurf]

http://www.digitalfaq.com/dvdguides/capture/atimpeg/atimpeg.htm

[FulciLives]

There is an excellent BITRATE CALCULATOR right here on this very website. Here is the URL:

https://www.videohelp.com/calc

Here is the result that I got:



As you can see your target bitrate is 3403kbps IF you use 2 hours 45 minutes and 224kbps MP2 audio.

Notice I changed the default from 25MB to 100MB for the overhead. This is so you have some "breathing" room when you author it.

As suggested above use HalfD1 resolution (352x480 NTSC or 352x576 PAL) and at that resolution you should find that a bitrate of 3400kbps looks rather good.

As for the sound you have to remember that 224kbps is a "standard" for MP2 because MP2 is much "worse" than AC-3 or even MP3 so I wouldn't lower that any if you want half way decent sounding audio. Even the crap ass VCD format uses 224kbps MP2 audio.

As far as editing the MPEG-2 capture the best program is probably MPEG-VCR althouogh some people seem to like VideoRedo even more.

Also LordSmurf's website has a lot of really good info ... especially for ATI capture cards. Definately worth your time checking it out.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman