Camcorder a-d connversion or via capture card question?

[pandeyrajiv]

Hi all,

I had a quick question that could help me decide what type of camcorder I buy in the next few days...

I need to convert some of my videos on VHS to a SVCD format(or eventually DVD format)...Now before I used to convert analog video via a capture card to get the VCD mpeg1 files and I found that the MPEG suffered even more degradatiion (due to lack of proper filters)...so much so that the VHS looked better than the VCD...

This led me to think, why not transfer my analog video to digital format(using a Digital 8 or Mini DV) camcorder, thereby capturing in an uncompressed digital format and then firewire it digitally to my desktop and edit away before comverting to MPEG2 and burning to SVCD(or DVD in future).

The question I have is :
Which is a better way to convert analog to digital format --
Use a digital camcorder
OR
Use a capture card on my desktop unit(like Dazzle II)...

Which will give me a better digital source, since eventually MPEG2 compression WILL introduce a few compression artifacts anyway, so I want to minimize what I have to begin with...

Thanks for your response...

Rajiv

[PhArAoH]

Well...from the moment I bought my Sony TRV320 I never felt a need for a standard video card because not only I can capture full quality/resolution from my camcorder tape but I can ( as you mentioned ) do analog to digital conversion.

MPEG capture card is a very good piece of hardware. I personally don't have a need for one as I use a software encoder (TMPGEnc) to convert my captured AVI's to MPEG. IMO, the quality of the encoded MPEG is equal to the quality of the MPEG produced with a MPEG-capture card (at least).

The only advantage of MPEG capture card is that it converts video to
MPEG in real-time thus saving you a lot of time and it doesn't use your
system resources to do the job.

If you have a luxury of time then you can achieve the same (if not
better) result using an off-line software encoder to convert your AVI's to
MPEG.

The advantages of using Firewire and DV camcorder is that the transfered
copy of the video on your PC is identical to the source (no quality loss).

This is saved as AVI in your hard disk, you can then edit it, cut, add
effects and transitions and either export back to tape or convert it to
another video format: MPEG1 (VCD), MPEG2 (SVCD/DVD) or even DivX.

The video transferred through Firewire is called DV video. One hour or DV video takes about 13GB of hard disk space.

I have even managed to use my DV camcorder as a webcam with a free piece of software. Search www.downloads.com for the program called TeVeo.

There are real-time MPEG software encoders available: Wincoder, PowerVCRII etc. However, the quality of the video they produce doesn't even come close to that of TMPGEnc or MPEG capture cards.


I hope this will help you.


PhArAoH