Best capture card for specific purpose

[aguinsburg]

Hi everyone. I need to capture 8 hours of PAL-N VHS video and 20 hours of NTSC. After that I get a MiniDV camera. I have a camera with passthroug but only works with NTSC, so I will need a capture card for PAL-N footage. These are my options (i live in Argentina):
1) Miro DC 30 ($100)
2) Avermedia EZ DVD Maker ($70)
3) Use passtrough (only for NTSC)

Considering this options, which card do you suggest to use for this purpose? What kind of file (ie compression) I will get with each card?
Can I capture using lossless codec with all of them and then rencode to mpg2?

Thank you

[FulciLives]

I would go with the Avermedia EZ DVD Maker for the PAL-N captures.

Capture to an AVI file using HuffyUV or PICVideo MJPEG at 25fps and at 720x576 resolution.

For the audio use PCM WAV at 16-bit 48K Stereo settings.

The Avermedia EZ DVD Maker can capture direct to MPEG-2 DVD spec but doesn't do it very well unless you have a VERY fast computer (like 2.4Ghz P4 if not faster).

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[aguinsburg]

Thanks FulciLives. As far as I know, EZ Maker does not compress to MPEG2 (the one who does it is EZ Maker PRO). Any case, I can always capture to HuffyUV and then encode to MPEG2, right?
Actually, I like to convert it to NTSC but I suppose there is no difference in how to capture.
By the way, do you know how big a file will be using HuffyUV and PCM audio?
Thanks again!

[aguinsburg]

I had read that Avermedia will need a LOT of processing power. I actually own a 64 Mb video card and I´m not sure if this is going to work fine.

[FulciLives]

I had read that Avermedia will need a LOT of processing power. I actually own a 64 Mb video card and I´m not sure if this is going to work fine.

It will be fine as long as you capture to HuffyUV or PICVideo MJPEG.

You can do PAL to NTSC conversion after the capture but if you have a PAL source you must capture it that way ... only after capture can you convert to NTSC.

HuffyUV makes pretty big files. The compression can be anywhere from 2.0 to 2.5 that of uncompressed captures.

PICVideo MJPEG has quality settings and on the "19" quality setting it uses more compression than HuffyUV but not enough that you will really notice yet you do get much smaller files but still you will need a big HDD.

It is also best to have 2 different hard disk drives. One that you boot from (wth the operating OS such as WinXP) and the other, 2nd HDD, is used just to capture (and post filter).

- John "FulciLives" Coleman