Can anyone recomend a good DV/AV Capture card?

[dezine]

I was wondering if anyone has any recomendations for a good affordable DV/AV Capture Card to work with Ulead MSP 6.5 and Video Studio 6 as well as DVDWS.
I have a P4 1.6Ghz, 512 mb DDR Ram, 60 GB Partitioned HD as well as 120GB Firewire HD, GEForce 3 TI Graphics Card.
I have a firewire card already but it is not an AV capture card so I have been using an external DV/AV converter Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge. It works somewhat ok but I am not happy with my frame dropping and video quality when transfering from VHS to DV.
I thought that if I put in an internal capture card that I should be able to get better results than I am currently getting.

Thank you for the help,
Dezine (Michael)

[Allan55]

Hi,

I have been using an external DV/AV converter Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge

Mine and a friend's work just fine now (3 hours, no drops using Scenalyzer). They only drop frames when the TV signal itself glitches. If your label says 'A1' or '1x1' (anything but '1x2' unless there is a newer one I don't know about) you might want to complain and get a warranty replacement. We did.

We also took pains to ground together (14 ga wire) the VCRs we use as tuners, the TV, the cablevision cable, and the computers.

If you're using the included MainActor, it has proven problems with NTSC that don't happen with PAL (both Dazzle's and Main Concept's release). We're all waiting (with lessening patience) for a new version, which is claimed to be released this month... assuming Dazzle provides it. If not you can buy it from www.mainconcept.com

Allan

[CMP1223]

Canapus ADVC-50 or ADVC-100 (if you need output). Great product. locked audio.

-Chris

[VideoMann]

I go with Canopus products, but the problem maybe in that VHS tapes do not generate a good clean video signal when translated to DV format. The older the VHS tape the worst it is. The best solutions at reasonable price are the Dazzle and the ADVC. Try a brand new VHS tape and see if you got the same problem. Turn off any loaded applications while capturing (Task Bar).

I'm using Canopus ADVC with no dropped frames on Live TV video capture (My Taskbar has 4-5 apps running which is not recommended, including a local network). My VCR just died when I bought the Canopus. Maybe it thought it was no longer loved. I have not bought a new VCR yet so I can't test it on VHS tapes. I've tried Analog Camcorder tapes with no frame drops.

See if you can use Dazzle and a third party video software like iuVCR. It uses little computer resources. I would not go out and buy a new card if I were you until I fully tested all other options of configuration and software. While Dazzle has some problems most people are very happy with it and have not heard many complaining about dropped frames.

You may want to have 2 separate drives for video and the WindowsOS, also defragment your drive(s). The recommended speed of the drives should be 7200RPM and DMA should be enabled for the drive(s). It seems you meet those needs, but I just mention them for others to read.

[yg1968]

Videomann,

I thought the Canopus and the Dazzle DVC II or DCS 200 were hardware encoders. In other words, the Canopus transfers to your computer a signal that is already encoded to DV. Similarly, the Dazzle DVCII or DCS 200 transfer an mpeg file to the computer. If that's the case, your computer gets taken out of the capturing equation as far as hard disc speed or CPU speed.

Perhaps you meant the process of encoding DV to mpeg2 with TMPGEnc requires that all of your computer's ressources should be dedicated to this task? If that's what you meant, I agree that you should minimize your computer's other activities during this encoding process.

[Banko]

I just bought a OHCI VIA Compliant FireWire Card from http://www.newegg.com for 14 dollars! Works fine for me!

[VideoMann]

yg1968

Now that I think what you said, yes you are right.
--------- However -------------

When capturing video you should have as many resources (active programs) turned-off as possible. Yes the Canopus does all the "encoding" but the CPU must be able to write sequentially the frames it is been fed to the hardrive at real-time. This too is task intensive if it is done at a high resolution. If the CPU gets a bottleneck somewhere it will drop frames.

Now the Canopus goes from analog to digital AVI and the Dazzle goes to MPEG1 or 2 if needed. The Dazzle has a more task intensive problem since encoding to MPEG2 requires constant analysis of previous frames etc. . My response of turning things off is more appropriate to MPEG encoding but not necessarily excluding out Analog to Digital. Processing Video whether you are encoding or not , is a significant load on the CPU.

I have no problems in capturing video with the ADVC with a P4 2Ghz and you would expect that since the minimum recommended is something like 800MHz, BUT when I use Premiere 6 although I do not drop anyframes at all the Premiere software responds very sluggish like 2-3 seconds behind any command you give it while it captures the video live. The audio preview also degrades to a chirp. The final product comes out perfect. This tells me that Premiere being such a large program along with the video takes significant CPU resources without having the CPU to encode anything. I was told to turn everything off. I have not bother to do that yet, since the end product is very good video and audio at maximum resolution (uncompressed video and 48KHz/16 bit/stereo audio PCM). I've tried a small video capture program iuVCR and it captures great too at the same resolution and I can play a separate video clip with WindowsMedia Player while capturing live TV at full DVD resolution without dropped frames.

This tells me that CPU resources can help in preventing dropped frames if it does not need to run larger capturing software programs. If people get dropped frames then they should consider defragmenting the drive, turn off other applications, and if possible use less resource intensive software for video capturing. If that doesn't work then increase memory size. If that doesn't work then decrease the resolution of the capture, or the frame rate, or unfortunately switch to a less CPU intensive encoder or upgrade the computer to higher Megahertzs or should I say Gigahertzs.

Whether you are encoding or not video capture is demanding.