Help capturing laserdiscs with ATI AIW7500?

[ringthanex]

I am trying to capture laserdiscs, but even in the hiqhest quality settings the laserdisc capture looks like crap. Worse than even the capture of a dubbed vhs tape. It seems pixelized and grainy. Do capture cards have trouble with laserdiscs or am I doing something wrong. I am using the MMC 7.6 on DVD-quality setting for the capture. Thanks in advance for your help.

my specs:
p4 2.2/ATI AIW7500/512 megs ram/80gig maxtor 7200

[Savant]

The "on the fly" capturing in MMC isn't really that good. If you want the 'best' quality to capture from laserdisc, use a program like VirtualDub and capture in AVI with the huffyuv codec, then use TMPGenc and convert to MPEG using 2pass VBR encoding. Yeah it's going to take alot longer, but that's the price you pay for higher quality.

Your hardware is fine, it's the software that is holding you back.

Regards,

Savant

[binkyaut]

Ringthanex -

I would NOT use the default ATI setting for DVD capture - it only captures at 640X480 for some reason. I would setup a new profile to capture in MPEG2, 720X480, i-frames only, with at least 8000 Kbs (not sure if that should be a big or small 'k' ) Constant Bit Rate. I'm not quite sure what you want to do with the file, but you can tweek your settings more from there. I.E. - if I knew I was going to have to re-encode for DVD, I would set the bitrate higher to get the cleanest mpeg picture. I would choose constant bit rate on the capture, so you have cleaner scene transitions, then use 2pass VBR on your re-encode. The AVI/Huffyuv Codec route is the BEST way to go - but only if you have to have alot of hard drive space to work with the file. And if you download the Huffy codec, you should be able to choose it in the ATI MMC software as well by setting up a customized AVI capture.