best capture settings for RR and Millenium2

[kulich]

I've combed this board and the web and can't find anything which matches what I'm looking for, hence this post.

I bought RRS and a Millenium2 card so I could make a couple of NTSC VCDs of some poor quality vhs tapes. I don't quite know if I want to continue making video afterwards - based on my experiences I'd guess not .

I've tried virtualdub, ulead MediaStudio 5 and the Matrox PC-V to capture files in both avi and mjpeg formats , at 24 and 16 bit RGB and at 15 and 30 f/s and as mpeg files with similar results - I either lose frames or the quality is worse than the original.

Worse, I can't encode well. I've tried virtualdub and mediastudio, and demos of the panasonic encoder, and ligos encoder and it doesn't work or it takes far too long.

I'm using an old box - k62-350 @375 w/128 mb of edo - hard drive is plenty big and fast enough.

If I send the files over to my main computer I can process them (the RGB ones - I know the mjpeg ones are proprietary) with MS Moviemaker. That's ok for playing around, but I want to crop the frames and play with some simple enhancements.

My questions are - what is the best format I should be starting with? - RGB 24 @ 15 f/s and 352 by 240

What should I use to capture - virtualdub?

Audio - the VHS tapes are music videos - is there a benefit using high quality audio when copying from an old vhs tape?

What should I use to encode and what format should I encode to? Should I edit as an avi or as a mpeg file. VCS Easy or Nero?

I suppose I'm asking for the moon - or a one step process. The problem is I'm over my head, but the simple stuff like MovieMaker is too basic.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Peter

[smitty]

Lots of questions!
with the age of your computer you are going to find some slow results. However with some work it should work.
seems you have 2 issues 1/ capturing 2/ encoding
You don't state your OS you should be using win98 se
first you need to set up your hardware
a second physical hard drive to capture to (a single drive may slow the thru put causing dropped frames)
the Matrox drive test program( HD benchmark) should be 7 or 8 mb/sec( allow headroom for capture)
some win98se tweaks can be found here

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

I used a RRS on a P1 233 successfully using MJPEG at max quality 24bit full screen NTSC 704x480
once your hardware is up to speed you should be able to use any of the capture progs you mention.
if you dont want to upgrade MSP5 to 6 or better you may want to add picvideo to maintain quality during edit then encode
if you upgrade the mpeg1 output of MSP is pretty good
tmpenc is very good but very slow on your machine you may want test Nero
hope this basic info helps
smitty

[Debbie]

Video capturing and editing and also re-encoding puts a heavy load on all hardware inside the tower.
Unless you have a powerfull system with a lot of "horse power" you will always be disapointed with the results.

Debbie

[kulich]

Thanks so much Smitty - it helps.

I do have two drives, and the data transfer speed is over 14 mb/s on the video storage drive. That box is running win98SE and is almost at the end of being upgradable. I've ordered a k62 450 mhz cpu which will run at 500 nicely and is the absolute largest I can put into that Asus SP97-V. I think the hardware end is covered.

Tell me, how do you turn mjpeg into mpeg - with MSP?

How do you use the PIC codec from within MSP? What settings work? That has crashed my machine more often than not.

Where are we? I just captured a group of files using rgb 24 and 15 f/s without a single frame drop. Should I edit in MSP and then encode to mpeg.

At least I was able to capture some frames and share them around.

What patience you all have - or maybe I should have started this hobby earlier.

Thanks again - Peter

Oh - And thanks to you too Debbie. I realize that there is lots of stress on the system, but I thought I was working with tried antique kind of stuff. Judging by the comments in this forum people have been rendering analogue happily since the mid 90's.

I assume then that I would be better off capyuring with my millenium and transferring the files over to my main computer to render them.

Peter

[mits]

Kulich,
since i was an owner of Mill2/RRS some time ago, i have to add the following.
1. As smitty has already mentioned assign your fastest hard drive to be the capture drive.
2. Use Mjpg (half size 320*480 i think in NTSC world) format with the compression slider to the highest position and NOT RGB since your capture machine is slow, and on the other hand using mjpg which is hardware based on the RRS means less load on your cpu.
For sound, CD quality will be more than enough (i.e. PCM, 44kHz, 16 bit sterero).
3. You don't need higher than half size resolution since you are going to convert to VCD later which menas that you are going to resize to 320 * 240.
4. Use avi_io for capturing. Even the trial version will do the job since it allows 3 consequtive files (2Gb each) to be captured which means 27 min approximately of video.
5. After you have captured you can edit your clips with msp 5. If you want to edit them in your main machine the only thing that you have to do do is to install a software based mjpg codec (like mainconcept or picvideo).
6. If you are all done with editing then load your edited clips to virtualdub (freeware), deinterlace and resize them down to 320*240 and start the frame server.
7. Feed tmpgenc (the best freeware for mpg1 encoding) with the video from your frame server and wait.
8. Burn your resulting mpgs with nero using the VCD template.

Be patient and good luck.

[kulich]

Thank you - that is exactly what I was looking for. All this experimenting was detracting from getting anything done and what with four steps in the process having any kind of overview proved impossible for me.

When I have my first good result I'll post back and let you all know how it went.

Cheers

Peter

[kulich]

I remembered that I said I’d get back – at least so that someone else might profit from my mistakes.

I was successful in turning my poor copy vhs to VCD. To me it looks better than the original, probably because I tweaked the contrast and brightness (an my new TV is far superior to the old one).

Using avi_io, I captured at 320 x 240 using mjpeg compression with the slider all the way up. There was an insignificant number of dropped frames at these settings. I also used cd quality sound.

I trimmed with virtual dub, set up deinterlace and cropping, and contrast and brightness and frame served each segment to tmpgenc.

Setting up the frame server threw me because I didn’t know you had to

1.) merge the .reg file

2.) turn it on from wherever your virtualdub directory is.

Once I learned that, it was a piece of cake.

Yes – wait, I did. maybe 1 1/2 hours for a 30 minute section.

I transferred the mpeg files over to my main machine and stitched them together with MS MovieMaker. I had access to Premier, but decided the learning curve was enough – besides, I didn’t want to wait, and it seemed like overkill to use Premier to make a lowly VCD.

MS MovieMaker created a master mpeg file which Nero was happy to burn.

Summary – yes it worked. If I did it again I think I’d capture to mjpeg on the old box with the capture card, then send it over to the modern machine for rendering. Yesterday, I put a K6-2 500 into the old box, so with that and 128 mb of EDO it is effectively maxed out. That’s nice, knowing that it is as fast as it is possible to get with that board. It also is a nice way to use an old 20 gb drive as a video file store.

All this because Matrox is selling off the Millenium II version of Rainbow Runner for $14 - and you can get a Millenium II from vfxweb.com for $10. Right!

Thanks for all your help.

Peter

[landrover]

You shouldn't worry too much about dropping frames when capturing low quality vhs footage. Bad frames and drop-outs in the original material will be skipped by the capture driver and thus registered as frame drops. Many old VHS tapes suffer from tracking problems which belong to the past as soon as you digitized the lot, contributing to the "better than original" quality. AVI_IO stands out here because it keeps video and audio in sync, despite the dropped frames. And a bad video sequence with all garbage "filtered out" by the capture driver will result in better than original quality.
Some years ago I captured the 1920's silent movie "Nosferatu" from a very bad VHS tape and worried about the drops. The resulting VCD turned out to be of truly outstanding quality compared to the VHS tape. It would even have been rewarding to transfer from old to new VHS tape this way. The quality gain is greater than the generation loss.

landrover