Capturing ATI AIW Radeon – how do I proceed higher Qua

[mpm]

Given the following :
PC features : Pentium 4, 1,5GHz.
Motherboard Intel D850MV
Soundcard SBLive 5.1.
ATI All-in Wonder Radeon with ATI Rage Theater
ATI Multimedia Center 7.1.

Recording using camcorder SONY HI8 with composite output
Capture programm is ULEAD Video Studio 5.0 with settings :
Capture by ATI Rage Theater Video Capture(file-version 6.13.10.5115)
Video Capture Filter : Pal B
Video Capture Pin : Frame Rate = 25 – Color Space/compression UYVY – Output size = 352x288
Video Crossbar : Input : Video composite In – Output : Video Decoder Out
Second Crossbar : Input : Video composite In - Output : Video composite Out
Audio Source : SBLive Wave Device
Capture Template : Video : Microsoft AVI files – 24 bit RGB – 352x288 (frame size) – 25 frames/sec – Uncompressed. Audio : PCM 48000 Hz 16 bit Mono
Image-editing (adding text or music) by ULEAD Video Studio 5.0. Edited images saved as AVI- file. Remark : poor quality.
VirtualDub 1.4.8 is used to remove frames from captured images. The remaining images are saved by videosetting : Direct Stream Copy and Save as old format AVI.
SVCD-file (MPEG2) is made by TMPGenc., using SuperVideoCD (PAL) as template. The settings are : Rate control mode : Constant Quality – Encode mode : Interlace – Motion search precision : Highest Quality.
Nero “burns” the SVCD-files on CD.
A stand-allone DVD-player is used for reproduction on TV.
VHS-tape and VHS-videorecorder offers a much better quality : less noise etc..

In order to obtain a higher-quality capturing : which options do I have ?
What's the option to go for and why ?
Is a programm such as Pinnacle Studio Version 7 preferable to ULEAD Video Studio 5.0 ? Why ? Is the current Frame Size (max. 352x288) not to small ? If so, how is capturing with Pinnacle DC10plus or Pinnacle Studio Deluxe(-capture-card, frame size 720x576, no longer using Video Studio 5.0) affecting the quality ?
Is direct-capturing compatible with ATI-drivers ? If so, where are manuals and tutorials available ?
Are there any other programms or drivers to increase the SVCD-quality ?


With all respect for your kind advise and support,

[marsmayhem]

This is my system:
P3 800Mhz
Windows XP Pro
768Mb (no pagefile needed anymore!)
ATI Radeon 64Mb DDR
2x 40Gb 7200 ATA66 drives
SB Live!

I suggest the following:

- Upgrade MMC to 7.6 (or whatever the latest available for your Radeon). You may need a special ATI capture driver (this differs from previous versions of MMC software where it wasn't needed).

- Make sure you're using latest display drivers from ATI for your OS too

- Make sure your harddrive can keep up with the capture. You'll want something like an ATA33/66 or higher, and 7200rpms wouldn't be bad either. Defrag the drive often, and it helps if this drive is physically seperate from your system drive (where your OS is) so that the OS and your capture apps don't run from the same drive as where you're capturing to

- Apply the performance tweaks to your system as recommended elsewhere on this website (eg. second hardware profile that's capture specific)

- If you're running XP, go to tweakxp.com and apply some of those performance tweaks they recommend over there

- Consider creating a user account on your machine you can use for capturing under that has most of the background software switched off - the stuff that normally starts on your system when Windows starts. Check msconfig for System startup options - disable what you don't need running while you're capturing. Use this user account with the custom Hardware profile you create above

- I'd go with ATI's capture software as they know exactly what's under their card's hood and can use the extra onboard buffers better than other capture software - just my opinion. You can select which codec you want for compression. People say for best quality, go lossless - ie. Huffyuv codec. Be prepared for HUGE file sizes. Make sure you have a LARGE hardrive. MJPEG might be better for you if size is an issue.

Capturing at 352x288 will give you a bad capture because you're throwing away half the fields from your input source - Hi8 puts out 400 vertical lines - you're squeezing it into 288. Go for 720x576 - I assume you're capping PAL, right? For NTSC, use 720x480. It'll pay off when you resize and encode later on in TMPGENC.

I think YUVY (I don't remember the exact letters) is supposed to be better than RGB capture - better colorspace. Maybe someone else can confirm/elaborate?

Why are you capping your audio at 48Khz (only necessary if you're making DVD MPEG2, and you could probably get away with plain old 44.1Khz and resample up to 48Khz if you need it - but SVCD only needs regular 44.1 Khz at 224kbps), and BTW why is it mono? Don't you want stereo sound?

I assume the SVCD template is the standard one that comes with TMPGENC, and not an XSVCD - ie. the resolution is 480x480 NTSC (or whatever the PAL equivalent is - 480x576??). The point is, you're capturing at a low resolution, and then re-encoding to a higher resolution, which will result in a VERY bad quality picture. That's like scanning a picture at a resolution of 16x16 and zooming it to 640x480 (well, I'm exaggerating slightly, but I think you get the point). The blocks become more visible when you resize up, causing blockiness. Resizing down, with decent resize filters, are better.

With a P4, latest TMPGENC is supposed to be on par with Cinema Craft Encoder's quality (one of the best in the business, supposedly). You can find comparisons between them somewhere else on this forum. For P3 systems, CCE was faster by up to four times. Also, CCE 2.64 provides multiple pass VBR (up to 5 I believe), which helps with filesize and bitrate allocation.

In summary,
- tweak your system and make sure you're using latest versions of your capping software
- cap at a high resolution, with a decent codec

For extra credit, you might consider using VirtualDub and filters and frameserve to TMPGENC. I hear the bicubic resize works well, if you're resizing to SVCD from a higher resolution. Other filters like sharpen and noise reduction might help you too - all depends on your source, and different people get different mileage, as always.

I cap at 720x480 in MPEG2 realtime at a bitrate of about 8Mbps, which is pretty high quality (maybe too high), then convert to other formats (VCD, SVCD). I'm fairly happy with the results, but I'm still experimenting with other options. I'm playing with DVD Workshop at the moment and I quite like it's menu building features. I wouldn't encode with anything other than a dedicated encoder like TMPGENC or CCE or something similar. I don't think the all-in-one packages like VideoStudio do as good a job. I had VS5 on my system for all of a week and pulled it because I wasn't happy with it.

Hope it helps. The tweaks alone helped me to not drop frames while capturing and I could finally go 720x480 (D1 resolution, as it's called) wiht 0 frames dropped.

If you notice that frames are dropped in the beginning of your capture with the ATI software, it could just be your drive getting started. Restart the capture until you don't get the message anymore. If it persists, either your HDD can't handle the input, or you have some more system tweaking to do.

Best of luck to you, mate...