Canopus Raptor analog capture

[dchip]

I just read a post from a user on epinions.com which says the Raptor is also capable of capturing clean analog video via a patch Canopus has made available. I find no mention of this on the Canopus page. Does anyone know if there is such a thing and does it work? Thanks.

[DrMordrid]

The upgrade is called the "Analog Capture Kit" and requires some serious CPU horsepower to capture to the DV software codec.

Using YUY, HuffyY or PICVideo MJPeg are your best bets but they still require some muscle, say 600mhz or so. PICVideo MJPeg or HuffY require half or less the disk performance of straight YUY captures.

You can get it at the Canopus D/L page:

http://www.canopuscorp.com/video2/so...Patches_Extras

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by DrMordrid (edited 20 May 2000).]

[dchip]

Thanks DrMordrid. I top off at PIII 450. I wonder how that analog patch would respond if I didn't need my captures to be any bigger than, say, 352x240? If I get the Raptor and the patch could work too, the card would be a windfall for me! Great bundle, DV capture, plus, I could easily take those ancient VHS tapes of family "stuff" and capture them for VCD without having to record them to DV tape first. I don't really do any full screen capture. I don't even go as high as 640x480. I just want to get video into the computer for VCD to save for many years to come. Hopefully, the VCD's I am making will be viewable on more and more DVD boxes in the future. Of course, obsolescence is also a possibility, but that's a problem none of us will ever solve.

[dchip]

Doc, I'm going to submit that last question directly to Canopus. I looked at the download page and it's got a big red warning that the analog capture will not likely be smooth. Still I think the card is great and I have my G200TV for the analog stuff. It's down to what software bundle. A hundred times I have thought MSP6 is definately THE ONE. I just havn't been able to see anything made with it. Is there anywhere I can go to see some clips? Canopus also bundles EDIT DV. I saw some "spices" on one of it's pages that looked fantastic. I'll bet MSP can do the same things but ULEAD's page is not demonstrative enough.

[Grigory]

Capture kit work only under win98.
Available iamge size is 720x576 (480 for NTSC) or 360x288 (240) ONLY.

Capture formats are RGB24, 16, 8, and a variantion of YUY2 with another byte ordering.
You can use sofware compression such as HuffY lossless codec to decrease the datarate.
At 360x288 any software MJPEG codec will work fine on 400+ CPU. Canopus offers their own MJPEG codec too.

The best way is to capture with HuffY codec.

As a capture device, the analog capture works following video for windows specifications. You can use any capture program such as AVI_IO or VirtualDub.

The capture quality is very good, I did not find any quality drop in comparison with Matrox uncompressed captures or Tv tuner cards.

You cannot compress to DV on the fly. This requires ~1800 CPU.

Grigory

[dchip]

Thanks for the info Grigory. I think it just might work fine for me.