Distorted region in captured video

[kefoo]

Hi. I'm capturing 704x480 YUY2 with HuffYUV on an RRG and G400 DH with VidTools 1.52.033 and PowerDesk 5.41.008. The captured video has about 8 - 10 lines of distortion at the bottom where it looks like the lines got shifted way off to the left, and there's a green band, about the same size, below that. At first I thought it was because the source tape is getting old, but I'm getting this with everything I record from tape at this resolution. Direct from TV captures are fine, other than a 5 or so line blank spot at the bottom. At lower resolutions, the garbage isn't as major, but it's still there. Normally I would simply chop it off during encoding, but it's a big enough region to require some significant horizontal clipping to keep the aspect ratio in whack. Any ideas?

Kevin

[This message has been edited by kefoo (edited 09 July 2000).]

[Dr Mordrid]

This is rather common. Sometimes it's seen with one source and not another. When output to a VCR or TV it usually falls into the overscan zone and isn't visible.

Dr. Mordrid

[kefoo]

Is there anything I can do to correct it, or is it a defect of the source? The distortion seems to be the same regardless of the source tape, so I was hoping there was something I could adjust in the software to correct for it. I'm encoding these captures to MPEG for computer viewing, so I can't let it disappear into the oblivion of overscan. I had been capturing without this problem for a while, then I reinstalled Win98 and it showed up, which seems too well timed to not be a software problem. I recaptured something I had done a while back and noticed it's capturing less of the video at the top than it used to, as if the RR is capturing a window offset by several pixels down. I also upgraded the drivers when I reinstalled, so I'll back out to an earlier version and see if that helps. Thanks.

Kevin

[kefoo]

Well, I backed up to VT 1.51 and PD 5.30. The green bar has been replaced by a black one. I'm positive I had this working with these versions a few weeks ago. Is there anything you can think of, however remote the possibility, that might fix this?

Kevin

[kefoo]

On a hunch, I dropped an old HD in my system that had Windows 98 installed on it. The garbage at the bottom of the frame is gone, so this is definitely a software issue. Does anybody have any ideas what could be causing this, no matter how remote the possibility?

Kevin