First, I am capturing television (just so you know the source quality). It's cable.

I have two methods available to me for capture:

1) i recently bought a dazzle hollywood bridge + firewire card to capture the analog signal (routed thru my vcr) into dv avi's. i'm using scenalyzer or premiere to capture. (720x480)

2) i've had a rainbow runner g series for a while, and this has been my longest used method to capture television. i've been using avi_io with the picvideo codec to capture @ 704x480.

Now, i've compared the resulting avi's from both methods, and even though i've read that the dv capture should be completely lossless (which i guess it is), and should be of quality = to the source, it almost seems the analog capture from my rainbow runner looks better -- specifically, it looks sharper. the capture through the firewire has more vibrant colors, but it seems to be a little "softer". also, when i play the avi using windows media player, it opens in a much smaller window (@ 100% zoom) than the avi created using my rainbow runner. this is confusing seeing that the resolution of the dv avi capture should be higher (just marginally). also, my picvideo quality is only set to 18, not even at the highest (because i end up dropping a couple frames every minute).

my end product goal is to have these avi's converted to svcd. i haven't compared two exact clips yet, but i'm encoding as i type this...

any comments, suggestions or ideas? if i need to elaborate on any of the details, let me know. i'd post some sample clips, but the avi's are huge. maybe i'll take a couple screen shots...