powerful enough?

[downer]

I just bought an ADVC-50 analog to digital capture card.

I was wondering if my current system will be powerful enough to do some VHS -> DVD conversions

Pentium III 700mhz
512mb memory (can be upgraded to more if need be)
18gig Ultra Wide SCSI - OS
47gig Ultra Wide SCSI - for data
16meg Creative Labs video card

Will this be sufficient to capture then encode? I know the encoding will take a long time but that is all this machine is doing.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[0 kewl]

The processor speed could be higher (that is the most important factor when it comes to the speed of encoding) but it is definitely powerful enough to do the job (although it might take quite some time to encode).

[The village idiot]

More than enough for capture (depending on the app you use). The encoding wil take somewhere in the 6 to 10 hour range for an hour of source material.

[CauCauCau]

I have an athlon 700 with 128 and only a 5400 rpm 17 gig harddrive and I capture and encode more than is good for me . Right now I'm re-encoding an hour of footage with 4 filters and it's going to finish in 11 hours. You get used to it.

[crahak]

Well, it depends. I could not get used to it, and a faster CPU/mobo is rather cheap nowadays. 11 hours per movie, if you're into it at all... No way. When I do encoding, I encode several movies a day. I just don't have the time to spare for 11 hour long encodes. Sorry.

[CauCauCau]

Well, it depends. I could not get used to it, and a faster CPU/mobo is rather cheap nowadays. 11 hours per movie, if you're into it at all... No way. When I do encoding, I encode several movies a day. I just don't have the time to spare for 11 hour long encodes. Sorry.

It's the filters that do it. Without the filters, the encoding I'm doing would be done in 3-4 hours (but you should see the difference between the before and afte clips-- perhaps I'll cut a scene of each and post them somewhere). It's also running in the background, in "idle" mode where it only uses CPU power that isn't currently being used by other programs. 11 hours isn't that much when you sleep for eight of it and the other three run in the background while you do other useful stuff on the computer. Encoding never gets in the way of useful computer time for me. It never takes any of my "time to spare."

I would love to get a new mobo/cpu/ram and even a new graphics card. But that's not going to happen for me any time soon. Anyway, my point: your system is good enough.

[downer]

thanks for the reply's. I just encoded a 20 minute video in about 5 hours so that isn't to bad.

CauCauCau: what filters do you use? if i am capturing VHS -> DV and encoding to SVCD and eventually DVD-R should i be using any of these?

Thanks.

[CauCauCau]

thanks for the reply's. I just encoded a 20 minute video in about 5 hours so that isn't to bad.

It's all a matter of perspective and patience . If it doesn't seem like a long time to you, then it's just fine. What program were you using to encode? DV to SVCD format right?

CauCauCau: what filters do you use? if i am capturing VHS -> DV and encoding to SVCD and eventually DVD-R should i be using any of these?

Thanks.

It's just a little filter coctail I put together to deal with bad VHS source. I'm curretnly dealing with AVIs (using Virtualdub, so I don't know how useful this will be for you). I run a brightness/contrast filter to reduce the brightness slightly (my VCRs fault), I crop the wierd wavy lines my VCR puts out that my capture card gets at the bottom of the screen but TVs don't). I resize to the appropriate size for the final format. I do a 2d cleaning and a noise reduction (with thresholds that I've figured out work great for my VCR). There should be comparable filters for MPEG related programs. I'm not doing anything that's special. I just looked at my final product and asked, what don't I like about this movie? Then I applied the filters to solve the problems, with their settings tweaked for my specific setup (trial an error and a lot of previewing/doing small chunks to figure those out).

The movie I'm filtering is a backup/improvement of a "previously viewed" movie bought from Blockbuster. It must have been watched a billion times or something-- it was bad. A friend bought it for me, so returning it could have been seen as a tide impolite, so I decided to use it as a test bed for filters.

Using filters like this can multiply your encode time. I have one filter for virtualdub that when given the settings I want, encodes at a whopping 1 frame per second. With 30 frames to a second, it takes up to 30 hours to encode it. Use filters as you "need" them. They may sound like great things to use, but only use them when you're not in a rush. As far as quality goes, if you've got a good source in, you won't need to use filters very much.

^Cau