DC10 or AllInWoner 128pro?

[Kruzin]

I have been given a new task at work.
The boss has a bunch of old Hi-8 video tapes, and a circa1990 camcorder with only analog RCA output.
He wants me to convert these tapes to .MPG or something that can easilly be played on most PCs.
I have the choice of using one of two cards we have. I cannot buy any new equipment. The cards are (1)ATI All In Wonder w/rage128 pro (AGP) or (2) Pinnacle DC10.

Which do you recommend for simple capture (no real editing), and to what format should they be done for the greatest compatability?

[landrover]

Don't know about the AIW, but the DC 10 is a capture card with hardware MJPEG by Zoran, just like on G200 and G400 Marvels and can be used as such, albeit that it lacks a tuner. Which you don't need for the purpose you mention.
Hope this gives a clue,

landrover

[LvR]

Yep - I would go with the DC10 in Mjpeg (cant do anything else) - "Best" capture setting at about 4 M/s with either Studio or AVI_IO will do very well. (no serious hardware required - a Piii 300 will do the job and most all older disks can handle that datarate )

Chase it through TMPGEnc for MpegX and there you go.

Edit: All of that only if you are running W98. If you are running either W2K or XP and dont have Studio7or8, you are screwed as the DC10 drivers are included there and is not a lone standing driver package.

[Kruzin]

Thanks for the replies.
This will be used on a win98 system.
ATM, I don't have any software for either card...nobody around here ever kept track of that stuff before I got here.
I do have a copy of the Ulead Video Studio (Basic-SE) that came with the Audigy Platinum I've been using to x-fer old audio tapes...any thoughts on if this software would work with the DC10?

[LvR]

Its goint to be a bitch getting that DC10 to run without its driver disk though once you do it should work ok with VS - I used to have a few clients using that combo.

If you cant get a disk around there, just shout - I see the hw installer is in a separate directory on the disk - 2M - can mail it if you want - dont know if it will work like that without Studio present as Pinnacle is often doing very sneaky things.

[Kruzin]

Thanks, LvR, but I think I have it covered....I d/l'd some stuff from the Pinnacle web site earlier today, and might have a line on where the original disk is (didn't get a chance to check it out today).
Hopefully, I'll have some time to install the card in the next few days, and see how it goes...

[Kruzin]

Well, I finally had a chance to try to set up the DC10 today.
Found the original CD, was ready to do some serious capturing today.
Cleaned up the camera, had a stack of Hi8 tapes ready to go.

When I opened my system, I was horribly reminded that I got stuck with a system with a really cheasy PC-Chips mobo. No AGP slot, only 2 PCI slots. I am already using both, for my Audigy and an old Millennium that drives my secondary display.
Put in a request for a real mobo....maybe in a week or two, I'll get an answer

[Kruzin]

Well, my request for a new mobo was denied.
Instead, I was given another rig, in a different location in the school (great, more running around). It's almost the same as the one I have in my office; PC-Chips mobo (no AGP, 2 PCI slot). Onboard video, cheap crystal sound card in one PCI slot, DC10+ in the other, Celeron900, 128 meg RAM (I have more stashed in my office I plan to install). 40gig primary with win98SE, 100gig secondary, dedicated for capture files.
Running the bundled studio 7 for capture.
Have been trying it out for a couple days now, and have some newbie questions....

1) Is this the best software to use for capturing from an old Hi8 camcorder, or is there another (better) software solution that will be more efficient/better quality with this hardware? I am finding that when studio7 goes into editing mode, and you select a 2gig .avi capture file, it will take it up to 45 min. to do it's scene detection stuff before you can start selecting scenes.

1a) Rendering times are also extreme to get those huge avi files to mpeg. Hours on end. Is this normal? Will more RAM help this?(don't think I can convince the boss to upgrade the processor)

2) What is the best config I can run as far as cache/swapfile/etc. to try to minimize frame drop? When capturing at the highest quality levels, I am dropping ~150-175 frames/hour. I don't know if this is normal, or if I can do better...

3) What codecs/player can I install in win95 and 98(fe) systems that will run mpeg2 files full screen? I d/l'd media player9 this morning, and when I tried to install it on a 98fe system, it told me I had to have at least 98SE. When I tried to upgrade to 98SE, the windows update told me the system had to have a co-processor for SE (this was an old AMD-K6 rig), and that this system could not run SE (and we have a number of these systems) .

More questions to follow....

[KRSESQ]

Here is a source for Windows tweaks to better configure your system for non-linear editing. This was written for Windows ME but nearly all of these tweaks can be applied to Windows 98.

http://www.videoguys.com/WinME_Tweaks.html

Unless you want to make DVDs with these vids, you're probably better off using MPEG1 at 1/4 resolution (example, 352x240). This should provide adequate quality for your Hi8 source, especially using composite-RCA input. Then they can be played in nearly all versions of Media Player and can be used to make VCDs which will play in most stand-alone DVD players (data rate 1500 kb max, combined video and audio. Set audio for 96-128 and use the overhead for the video stream).

AFAIK only software DVD players will play MPEG2, and most of those won't even install on a system unless there's a DVD drive present.

No matter what, plan on rendering to MPEG taking a long time, although the 1/4 rez MPEG1 shouldn't take as long as full-rez MPEG2.

Any idea if the MB uses UDMA33 or better for hard drive transfers? If not, that will be a serious bottleneck for full-rez video captures and could be a source of your dropped frames. Set the capture drive alone on the secondary IDE. Slave the CDROM to the primary.

(taking a second look at your specs, a Celeron 900 system *should* handle UDMA33 and/or UDMA66. Doublecheck to be sure.)

Make sure the on-board video is disabled in BIOS (it might disable automatically when a vid card is installed). The sound card might be a source of PCI bus hogging. Not much you can do about that unless you can scare up a more modern card.

You'd almost certainly be a lot better off getting permission to plug that capture card and 100 gig HDD into your home system and use that!

Hope this helps.

Kevin

[LvR]

The best and most relevant Studio and DC10 tweaking tips can be had here. (Note that there are more than one page - and note the "Supertec" posts.

Make sure you are running on the latest 7.15.1 version of Studio - they have sorted quite a lot of bugs over time. Mpeg is a no-no with Studio imo - TMPGEnc is much faster (about 15%) and also gives superior results.

Scene detection - can be done (see settings) in realtime while capturing if your cpu is fast enough to not cause dropped frames (after tweaking). I find its a waste to do scene detection when you are doing basically only Hi8 to CD/DVD transfers with minimal titling and edits - use the cropping tool on the editor for the few times you wanna cut scenes

Datarate is around 4M max (You cannot produce anything other than Mjpeg compressed avis with this card - no RGB or YUY available) - no use upping to UDMA4/5 as nothing more is required.

Memory required- W2K with Studio runs around 180M here with 512 being available. W98 have always been able to get along with a lot less (128optimum?) - have a few guys running well on 64 too.

Quality - imo DC10 produces most likely the best Mjpeg material when compared to other analogue capture cards and that includes my G400TV and G450eTV. Different capture software will not improve "quality" of captures - the compression codec is hardware based - other capture software therefore effectively only offers a different user interface. The best alterative capture proggie to use is AVI_IO - Markus (the author) knows the DC10 best - he is the same person responsible for the capture routines in Studio.

Dropped frames - I have some customers that have been able to capture with no dropped frames on really small Piii 300 M systems when properly set up. Can try to minimize dropped frames by using the "TV cropping" feature while capturing.

DirectX - Version 8.1b the best for Studio/DC10, and have solved many problems for a lot of people when compared to DX7 for example

Mpeg2 decoder for 95/98fe and se/2000 - try Elecard

Media Player - best is 6.4 - uninstall the other bloatware and run on that.

Playability on all pcs - most likely Windows Media Encoder producing WMV files (320x240) - very low datarates (old and slower hardware should be ok) and Windows/Microsoft supports it - that guarantees it (yeah right) - can get it for free - doesnt require any fancy sw decoders to be chased down

[Kruzin]

Thanks for the replies.
I did not have a chance to do anything with it today, but probably will tomorrow. The computer was tied up rendering an mpeg2 file that I started yesterday. Was still rendering when I left work today.
Don't think I'll try that again