Newbie Help - Best System Advice

[Marlowe]

Hi,

I've been lurking here a couple of weeks and have found a wealth of information, but I do have a few questions. I did search the forums and read all the FAQ's, so I apologize if I repeat any questions that have been answered.

I have a Duron 800 with 128 RAM and 10 GB to capture with. What upgrade would give me better performance for analog capture? CPU or RAM?

I have my choice of using:

32 meg Savage S4 AGP & Pinnacle Studio PCTV Pro
or
16 meg AIW 128

Using VirtualDub, which should give me better results for analog captured AVI's?

Also, to capture AVI for VCD, what resolution should I use? 352x240 or something else for maximum quality/performance? Same question for SVCD.

Even when I try to capture to 480x480 AVI, I occasionally get stutters. 640x480 is out of the question.

Thanks for all the help so far and for reading my questions.

[holistic]

Greetings Marlowe .
Am new at this video capture thing myself but here are some things i have come to understand.
Capturing in AVI (raw) is going to load the harddrive the most .Therefore a FAST, LARGE, good quality drive is important
Capturing to MPEG (or other compression codec) will put a load on the processor.
The size of RAM on the video capture card has minimal effect to the result.
Your system should capture VCD format with no frame loss.
Cannot advise you on a capture card but i have my AVermedia TV/FM to be satisfactory

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: holistic on 2001-08-17 23:46:38 ]</font>

[Marlowe]

Thanks, holistic.

I'm new at this as well. I've noticed that, since I've started using VirtualDub, the CPU usage is very low (<10%.) So, the problems I'm having must be related to real-time MPEG-2 capture. I'll try high resolution AVI again as a test as soon as I get a larger HD, based on your suggestion.

You're right. The new ATI MMC 7.1 software offers a Video CD real-time capture. I drop no frames and it produces files that Nero accepts as compliant. The quality is poor, but it works well enough as a digital VCR. This makes me lean toward my current setup, unless someone can tell me that the PCTV Pro is a better card for some reason.

Am I right in inferring from your post that CPU and RAM upgrades won't do much for AVI capture, since the drive is in DMA mode?

[holistic]

This is all I have figured out to date :
My celeron 600(O/C to 900),7200 spin ATA66 drive and AVer TV capture card WILL capture FULL screen (640*480*16 @ 29.97 fps) in AVI but the 2GB file limit is reached in less than 70 seconds. At VCD standards (320*240) I can capture
enough .avi to put together a nicely edited VCD.
A faster CPU/memory/motherboard setup will assist in better software compression if your capture card dosen't have a harware encoder.
A faster harddrive will capture full screen at 640*480 but as i said you will max out your drive space very fast with no compression.
OR stay with the 'rig' you have a get a capture card that has hardware encoding. This will take the load off your CPU and harddrive and let you capture resolutions you want.

Any other opinions, comments, ideas are welcomed

[Marlowe]

holistic,

What card with hardware encoding would you recommend? I'll double check the two I have, but I'm pretty sure the PCTV Pro doesn't have any. The AIW 128 might have MPEG-1 or 2, I'll have to check.

I've got W2K, so I formatted my capture partition as NTFS to do away with the 2GB limit. I've read in other posts that FAT32 might be better for capture, but so far it is easier for me to have uninteruppted capture.

At 352x480 AVI and compression, I'm getting about a minute every 250 MB. Does that sound right? Also, if I want to encode to VCD, should I capture at that resolution? Will I get better results capturing higher for VCD? Or am I just wasting space.

Thanks for your helpful replies!

[Stansell]

I was able to capture at 720 x 480 using HuffYUV compression on a PentiumIII - 500 MHZ with 128M of RAM. I have an ATI AIW Pro (32M) using AVI/IO. I have the older VFW compatible drivers and MMC 6.3. My HD is an ATA 100.

I'm not sure how PIII 500MHZ compares to a Duron 800 MHZ in capture speed.

Some thing I've found with my system:

Processor speed helps if you use a compression codec such as HuffYUV or PIC MJPEG.

Using a bit of compression such as HuffYUV or PIC MJPEG can help prevent problems with overwelming the hard drive.

You get better quality capturing to AVI first then converting later using a software encoder. Hard drives are getting big and inexpensive. AVI files are easier to edit.

[Marlowe]

Thanks, Stansell.

I've used HuffYUV before; it cuts my AVI size in half.

CompUSA has a special this week for a 30GB 7200RPM Maxtor HD for $99. When you buy a Maxtor ATA 100 card you get $50 back. So it is like getting the card free. I'll do this to see if it improves my performance rather than writing to a partition of my main drive.

[Geno]

I currently have 700 mhz Slot A AMD with 128mb of ram Ata 33 cables, with a Seagate UDMA 100 7200rmp Hard Drive, under windows 98 using a AIW 32 MB DDR RADEON WIN98 drivers MMC 7.1, I use Vdub sense I can't record on the MM 7.1 don't know why, when using Vdub I get really high cpu usage, and alot of lost frames, maybe if I were to use MM 6.3 (a link to it would work) it would fix the proble. I drop about 500 frames in a 340x240 res avi capturing using DIVX 4.0 - 5.0 codec, where could I get the PIC codec MJPEG, so I can use it with either VDUB or MM 6.3x