Am I able to capture with a firewide board from a VCR???????

[fgtan]

I'm capturing from VCR using a pinnacle pctv card n I'm having a huge problem.
pentium 850 /7200 40 gb hd /256mb /voodo 3dfx
When I watch tv channels in my pc, the quality o f the image is not as good as watched in my tv, specially with far images, they loose sharpness n the quality really sucks.
Can I have the same image definition as my tv, in my pc???
When I capture with Vdub, I can capture without losing almost any quality.
But my major problem is the image quality that is gettin inside my pc.
And that's the point...
If I change my capture card to a firewide board will it increase the image quality???? Any others ideas to improove the image quality to be the same qual;ity as shown in my TV???

Wait 4 some comments.....Thanxs

[SingSing]

You can get better result if you capture in high bitrate Mpeg2.

or you can capture in AVI ( but 15 minutes per session due to the huge file size ). DV capture by firewire is same as AVI capture. Most people firewire capture is from their DVcam or VCR to DVcam pass through. That also end up with a huge avi file. I assume you can get a DV VCR with firewire interface at $2000.

Your best bet is still capture to high bitrate mpeg2, reencode to SVCD or VCD ( and use the color correction to sharpen your result ).

If your video tape is not top notch quality, it will always look bad in digital capture no matter what. Those minor analog noise is a major hit in digital video.

[dgraham]

If you buy a firewire card, you will have to get some device to convert analog video from your VCR to DV (digital video). The resolution of dv is 720 x 480 (NTSC, maybe PAL, I don't know) and the quality is great. Once you have DV in your pc, you can convert it to mpeg-1, mpeg-2, or whatever.

There are a few devices that do the analog to digital conversion. I like the Canopus ADVC-100 (http://www.justedit.com/products/advc100.php3) it works great and has lots of inputs/outputs, but some people use the Hollywood DV-Bridge, or the Sony DVMC-DA1 or DA2 which are discontinued but available on Ebay.

I don't know if this method is better or worse than capturing to mpeg-2 and re-encoding to SVCD, but I've never tried that. Either way is compressing and re-compressing the video.

Hope this helps.

-D

[Ashtrader2000]

Well in order to use a firewire board to capture fra a VCR, you would also need a DV camcorder with analog pass through! Expensive, and not an easy sollution. Someone suggested to capture in MPEG-2. A hardware encoder is expensive, and quality will be quite less than the souce. Software realtime encoding is just plain bad quality. A better solution would be to buy the Studio DC10+ card. It's rather cheap, and if you capture through S-video cabel and let the bitrate flow max, quality can be considered *almost* lossless!
I once made TV-rip with this card - cropped off any marks, that revieled it being a TV-rip - shared with people calling it A DVD-rip. Was told: "Nice RIP! Keep up the good work!" -Quality is THAT good!

Ashtrader