ATI wins my battle for DVD capture

[orbital]

to brian ellis

But how does the advc cope with drop-outs and how good is it when using it to output dv footage to vcr?
thanks

[Brian Ellis]

Will

DV capture involves copying the tape to disk, as an AVI file. This is not true capturing, as there is no codec conversion of the data. I don't know of anything low-cost that can copy a DV stream directly to MPEG, as it would require much horsepower or even elephantpower to do that in real time.

The best process, no matter how you capture the analogue, is to do all your editing at the AVI stage. You should convert to MPEG (e.g., with MSPro from the timeline, or with MF or TMPGEnc from a rendered AVI file) only at the very end. I use MSPro for DV capturing and editing, but I believe its younger brother, VideoStudio, is fine and is often bundled with IEEE-1394 cards (ie, is free). Editing in MPEG results in real quality loss.

Orbital

I've never had a glitch from any of my own VHS-C tapes. If there is a blank, unrecorded, space on the tape, the capturing will stop, as the DV signal disappears. You have to forward it to the next recorded part and restart the capture.

That having been said, the only time I've had drop-out problem was from one commercial VHS tape which was in atrocious condition (constant glitching on playback to a TV due to tape stretch). It captured when it could but simply did not convert to DV when the signal became unintelligible. I've captured other commercial VHS tapes, even Macromedia protected, for conversion to DVD, with quasi-zero glitches.

I've only twice made a VHS tape from a DV stream with it and had no problems using MSPro. Of course, the resultant tape is visibly poorer in quality if you do a direct comparison with a DVD burnt from the same source, but that is inevitable. by the nature of VHS. I would hazard a guess that if you compare VHS>DV>edit>DV>VHS with VHS>VHS, you would not see any significant difference on a TV screen (maybe slight blockiness artifacts on abrupt camera movements or suchlike). In fact, if you use noise reduction on night scenes, at the edit stage, there may be a distinct improvement. For the anecdote, some shots taken on VHS-C of about 50 African mongooses in Kenya at night, by a half-moon as only lighting, were difficult to see played directly. I was able to edit them, in DV AVI, so that the animals were reasonably distinct, the noise was visibly reduced and I got some semblance of colours. I was similarly able to improve shots taken at the Singapore Zoo "night safari".

Be warned, there are other bridges on the market, notably Sony and Dazzle. Comparisons in mag reviews have all stated that the Canopus was, by far, the best but, I always take such reviews with a pinch of salt. I have not tried any of the other makes and am unable to make any personal comments, other than to say that I'm more than happy with the Canopus.

Another advantage is that I can mix footage directly from analogue and real DV sources with no re-rendering.

[keithm]

Brian, I didn't know macromedia made copy protection! I'm sure you know it's macrovision The trouble with the above is time and money. Firstlt you have to have mediastudio pro (not cheap), and then a lot of time and decent proccessor power to convert to mpeg2. If you just want to convert old VHS then the best option is realtime convertion, like the radeons do. As for editing the mpeg2 stream: if you keep the project attributes and the output file the same as the source, mediastudio will just cut the mpeg and copy it without re-rendering it-no quality loss.

I know where quality is paramount the ATI radeon root may not be the best, but it's good enough. Another major advantage seems to be with field order, tell the Radeon to capture deinterlaced and the completed mpeg2 transfers to DVD fine and plays on a stand alone DVD player: I had loads of problems with fields in the wrong order and stuttering video playback.

[Brian Ellis]

Lapsus keyboardii, Keith!

I may be wrong, but I understand that timeline or file conversion to mpeg does not NEED horsepower: it just takes a lot longer if you don't have it! What does need horsepower is software-codeced capture!

I agree that simply cutting mpeg will be ok, but the moment you add transitions, titles, filters, sound and so on, you will be in deep trouble if you wish to have decent quality. Editing in MPEG is really a no-no. Whereas I use MSP, VideoStudio will give much of the same functionality for nothing, if it's thrown in with your firewire card.

I can't comment on the ATI Radeon card as I've never tried one.

[keithm]

actually, transistions work ok: by horsepower I just mean the more you have the quicker it will become.. My biggest problem is getting my old VHS tapes to play. In some case the deteriation is quite shocking. I'm having to use upteem external boxes to try to improve the stability of the picture before getting it into the PC.

[Will Hay]

Hi Brian, hi Keith.
Firstly, thanks for all the assistance, I've taken up far too much of your time but I'm very grateful.
Despite all your help, and through my own fault I'm not really any further forward.
I tried a patch last night from a chap called George over at Sudian and initially the results were far better than I'd been getting recently. I tried a 22 minutes vhs episode of a tv show - I did it in two batches (to avoid the adverts) and the second part was wonderful (not superb but as I said far better than recent results) but the first was great for the first five minutes but then, for no apparent reason went *very* blocky.
I'll give it another go at the weekend.
As you know Keith I've invested (!) £33 on the Radeon (as it was such a bargain) and hope it doesn't conflict with my system (as you know I borrowed an ATI AIW a while back and had horrendous problems).
As I mentioned before my budget is minimal but I'm definately going to invest in a second hard drive (essesntial, I understand).
If the Radeon works fine I'll be okay, but if it doesn't I seem to have two options...
1) Replace my motherboard incorporating either an SiS or Intel chipset and at the same time replace the processor hungry SB soundcard.
2) Stick with what I have (albeit purchase a second hard drive) and buy the canopus dv machine.
The problem with option 1 is I'd be wise to improve my processor and memory at the same time (and plus I can't seem to find another motherbaord with a different chipset with which I can use my current processor and SDRam PC100 memory) which would probably be more expensive than the canopus thingy.
Video capture, as you've probably guessed, is the most important factor for me, primarily as I'm videoing my son for five to fifteen mins every month (ever since he was born Feb 2002) and compiling a vcd for when my wife and I are old and grey
In between this I'm converting some old vhs episodes of favourite tv shows onto vcd too.
...
Brian,
I honestly didn't know about editing mpeg, I had no idea I should be editing in avi format before converting, I don't even know how to render an avi, that might give you an idea what a novice I am.
Anyway, thanks to you guys I have a clearer understanding what my problems are and more importantly what my options are.
Thanks,
Will
--
What I would add is when I say editing mpeg, all I'm doing is adding one to another to make one long one, and adding the first three minutes of one part, then taking the middle four minutes and last five minutes and creating what I call a better one (ie deleting the part my wife dropped the camera, that kind of editing )

[Will Hay]

I was given a link to a forum and subsequently a latency file created by George Breese (do you guys know him?), as a result of a forum user over at www.sudian.com

http://forums.sudhian.com/messageview.cfm?catid=28&threadid=25139

...I've amended my system.ini file and the resulting capture is incredible!
There is no way I'd get this level of capture quality before.
Only problem is I'm getting screen lock-ups (lol!) but think it *might* be something to do with George's patch (I installed this and experienced lock-ups *before* I amended the system.ini file). I've removed the latency patch and will see if the lock-ups continue.
I also removed the latest G400 drivers (inc. the RR-G drivers) and installed the originals that came with the card but still freezing.
I'll monitor and see.
I'll still be trying the Radeon, so will probably backupand format, try on a totally clean machine.
Any cmments on the amended system.inin file would be appreciated.
Will
(extract of system.inin amendment follows)...
...good luck with it .. just by chance, i ran across another tweak today that may help (found it under sblive FAQs after checking for driver updates) ..
---
go to Start-Programs-Accessories-SystemTools-SystemFilesEditor
(if SysFileEditor not listed, then just do a file search for System.Ini, and open with simple text editor - notepad)
--find the section labeled [386 enh], and add the following line as shown below (with # corresponding to irq for your sound card)
irq#=4096
Note- on reboot, this will add a buffer for SBLive bus sharing (which may be just what the doctor ordered for your video capture problems - assuming sblive is interfering with bus access) .. ONLY WORKS FOR WIN95/98se (with irq steering enabled -- which should be the case by default) .. as a double check, go to Device Manager, System Devices, "PCI Bus" (and look at info under the IRQ steering tab) - but very unlikely that IRQ steering is disabled. PS - the Sblive FAQ says this may be hazardous (possible restart problems) ... although, for some strange reason, my machine got stuck on the shutdown (probably some unrelated glitch), i just pressed the hot reboot button, and completed the restart without any other issues ... i assume the tweak is in place on my system (though not sure how to verify that) .. as far as performance, i really can't tell any difference on my system .. apart from the hardware limitations of the sblive (which are considerable -- looking at a Hercules soundcard for upgrade), i've been pretty well pleased with sound playback (for games, music, etc) .. basically, no noticeable improvement beyond the bios tweaks in previous post, but might make a difference with extra demands of video capture card
PPS ... if these tweaks don't help, next step would be to look at your irq assignments -- what's sharing with what ... probably should have done that first, but no matter .. if these tweaks don't help, there's still a chance problems can be solved by swapping cards around, and trying to reduce conflicts to extent possible ..

[keithm]

I have to admit the ATI is far more fussy over the quality of the vcr source than the Matrox. Poor tracking or drop out seems to cause the ATI to freeze frames far more easily than the G400. I've actually started to use a Macrovision defeater to clean up the video (non macro protected source) to help things out.

[Will Hay]

Hi Keith,
As I mentioned, whilst I bought the ATI I don't hold out much hope.
I don't know why I never had any luck with them but I've been playing around with the RR-G and since ghosting my old operating system back on I've had pretty good results, far greater than I achieved before and good enough for what I'm doing.
I experimented a little with huffyuf and lost frames but understand it's due to my one and only hard drive. As you know I'll solve that when my RAID array comes.
I wasn't too optimistic when you mentioned the ATI is processor dependant, but I'll certainly give them both a whirl.
I intend to reformat, re-install everything and install just a standard graphics driver on for the card - then ghost it to a partition I'll create. If I have no success with the ATI I'll just ghost over and re-install my trusty old Matrox.
Most of my stuff is converting VHS (as you know now) so in order to get three episodes to a disk (I use 99 min cd-r's) whilst the quality ain't brilliant it's close enough to the VHS source for me.
The converting of my 9 month old son toddling around has currently been in vcd but I think I'll increase this to svcd (the reason I hadn't before is I only run TMPGEnc and the svcd facility ran out).
I'll test them both (ATI hasn't arrived yet) over the next couple of weeks and report back.
Considering Brian's comments about these old dinosaur cards and the users who should be upgrading by now, I'm sure it'll interest MURC'ers as to how an old G400+RR-G compares with an ATI 64mb DDR ViVo Radeon, and more importantly from a novices point of view.
Whilst I'm blabbering...
...I did some testing last night using different settings, vcd compared to svcd (with TMPGEnc) and also changing the quality of the mepg in martox remote.
I must admit I didn't burn any to a disk (to try in my standalone dvd player) but when comparing them on my PC I didn't notice much difference (except the file size of course, svcd was double that of vcd).
Should I be seeing a *noticable* increase in quality?
Best regards,
Will

[keithm]

Will: the ATI ISN'T processor dependent! The faster the processor the higher the quality but anything above a 600 computer should grab realtime mpeg2

[Will Hay]

Originally posted by keithm
Will: the ATI ISN'T processor dependent! The faster the processor the higher the quality but anything above a 600 computer should grab realtime mpeg2

Oops!
Sorry Keith, I'm sure I detected something in your last (direct) e-mail but as I say I'm looking forward to playing!
Have you tried playing with mpeg1?
In the event I upgrade to XP (which I have on my laptop but Win98se on my desktop) are drivers for the ATI available?
I've been snooping around the ATI site but as it doesn't appear to have a model number (8500, 9500 etc. at least not from the ebay add I purchased from) was unsure where to start!
Will