Trouble capturing AVI with ATI's All-in-Wonder Radian

[sca_andest]

Hi folks,

I'm new to the world of digital video editing. I got a pretty powerful computer (Soyo DragonPlus motherboard, AMD Athlon 1700, 120 Gig HD space with a 2-60gig RAID-0 setup) specifically so that I could convert my huge existing Betamax collection into DV. But I got an ATI All-in-Wonder for the capture, and now I'm not sure that was a good choice...

When I try to record .vcr files (ATI's custom format), I have no problem. When I record .mpg or .mp2, it works, but I'm not satisfied with the quality of the encoding. (Especially the audio - there's too much white noise.) So I figured I'd record to high-quality .avi, then use software like virtualDub to convert it to mpegs/mp2s for VCD or SVCD burning. (I've got Nero's burning ROM.)

But now when I try to record AVI's with the ATI software, I get two problems: if I try to record 25 minutes, it seems to lose most of the data - the output file has extensive sound, but no video, and usually is less than a gig. When I record a short clip, it works ok, but there's still a few lines of distortion at the bottom of the screen.

I understand I ought to be able to use VirtualDub to do the capture, but when I try I get "no capture driver available".

Anyone got any directions I can go from here? Much appreciated if so.

[sca_andest]

Aha, I've found part of the problem - from the VirtualDub home page:

VirtualDub needs a Video for Windows capture driver to capture....ATI appears to be shipping their current devices with a WDM (Windows Driver Model) driver only; this can be used indirectly by VirtualDub through a Microsoft wrapper, but it is crippled in functionality and it also appears that the wrapper is buggy.

The wrapper will show up as "Microsoft WDM Image Capture (Win32)." If it works for you, great.

So apparently, I'm in the "not-great" category here...

[Zogg]

ATI recently posted a new driver and WDM driver, which seem to work okay.

I am also pretty new to this stuff. The AIW Radeon works pretty well, but is very dependent on your cpu so kill all other programs if you are trying to capture in higher resolutions.

[sca_andest]

Yeah, I went to their site after making that post and tried out the new drivers. Still no luck, and now I have no sound.

Then I tried uninstalling and reinstalling, and still I have no sound. I checked the web site for sound help, and they described a setup screen which lets you choose sound input - I remember seeing that setup screen, but it no longer exists for me. I can go through all the TV configuration screens, and the sound one never comes up.

So I'm a little burned on this software right now. I logged a tech support email, and if that doesn't get a response in a few days, I'll try uninstalling everything again, and reinstalling from scratch.

[Zogg]

Okay, I'll ask the obvious. You did connect the audio cable from the pigtail to the line in or mic input on your sound card, right? Then you have to go into the TV Tuner setup and pick the audio input source.

I'm running XP Pro, and the only trouble I had was with MPEG-2 playback. Once I uninstalled everything and reloaded it came up fine. First load the video driver, then MMC, then the DVD/MPEG-2 driver. I don't know where in there to load the WDM driver as I added it after the fact. BTW some are reporting problems with MMC 7.6 so get 7.5 if you need to.

[Gameshow Host]

When you say you have a few lines of distortion at the bottom of the screen, is this definitely a problem, or might it be the normal distortions you get on video tape recordings? All video tape recordings have a bit of distortion at the top or the bottom, in the portions of the video that cannot be seen on a TV screen. Maybe that's what you can see.