Pinnacle Systems Studio DC10 Plus

[z68h]

hi there. does anyone have the card mentioned in the subject? i saw some user comments in the Capture Card part of this site and would like to get some more feedback.

what format does the card support? avi?

anyway, any info - good or bad - is appreciated.

-mark

[disturbed1]

It captures using hardware mjpeg upto 6000KBYTES/s (not bits). Resolutions of 640x480, 640x240, 320x480, 320x240. And it has a cropping option that cuts gabled junk away from the edges, 608, 464, ~302, ~232, I'm not exact about the last sizes. Capture software was helped along by Markus Zinng (author of AV_IO), A/V sync is rock steady, and it splits files at 2gig.

Sound is through your sound card input (line, or mic).

The included software is great for transitions, and titles.

Keep in mind that's MJPEG, and it will take time to convert to MPEG. You'll need a fast and huge hard drive to capture to.

The quality of the caps are outstanding. There is zero difference between the captured material and the original (608x464@3000KBYTE/s).
Go here http://www.pinnaclesys.com for more specs. Make sure to check the forums as some report conflicts with certain hardware setups.

Well worth the $70

[z68h]

disturbed1: thanks for the additional info.

3 more questions:

1. what is mjpeg?
2. can TMPGE do an mjpeg > MPEG conversion
3. how much longer does it take for MJPEG > MPEG than for say DIVX > MPEG ?

thanks.

-mark

[fluxlink]

Mjpeg is a video codec that compresses the video signal.
The DC10 plus does this through hardware in real time when the video is captured. The AVI quality is excellent except for a slight flattening of the colors during compression.

Tmpge can do MJPEG > MPEG

An incredibly long time. I haven't done it in a while but it is like a 1:7 ration on a pentium 933 with 256 meg of ram. so 10 minutes of video takes roughly an hour to encode.

The DC10 Plus is a good product but if you have the option of going DV that would be a better choice.

[Betamax]

FluxLink, I'm not oke with your opinion.
Currently I've both DC10+ (MjPEG) and Asus7100DeLuxe (YUV2) installed in my system. My system is an Athlon 1.2Ghz with 2 ATA-100 disks of total capacity of 100Gb.

Asus is software codec (via motherboard's CPU) and it has bad capture quality (only suitable enough for VCD = 320x240). Althougd DC10+ has onboard Codec, and only in WinME (using latest drivers 1.06) I have (like you said) best quality, even for SVCD captures.
The only minus is that I only can capture for max. 70minutes, while most movies are around 90minutes.

AVI's captured via the DC10+, I can't those encode directly via TMPGenc. I first must recompress them (I use MjPEG of PIC-video) using VDub. It gives me a much smaller file, with the same quality still in it. And yes, it's very slow!

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, cause I cannot capture standard PAL-resolutions at 704x576. DC10 reduces it to 720x540 for SVCD (so eventualy TMPGenc will resize all to 480x576 -> lost in time at encoding to MPEG).

So best choice, still remains ATI AIW Radeon (something like Asus, but WITH internal codec's for better perfomance during capture)