G400TV or G450TV?

[Plane]

http://www.murc.ws/Previews/etv/eTV%20Preview-03.html

From the preview, I understand it is a software based MPEG2 capture card. Suppose I got a 1Ghz CPU and huge HDD space and I want to make great MPEG2 videos only. Which one should I go with?

G400TV records as MJPEG and convert to MPEG2 and G450TV records as MPEG2 directly. Which one would provide a better image quality?

Sorry for my poor english but I am really need a help.

[This message has been edited by Plane (edited 12 February 2001).]

[Brian Ellis]

Now, there's a question.

Assuming (and that's a big assumption ) your systems are all perfect and you want the final result in MPEG2, then I'd say miss out the intermediate MJPEG. On the other hand, it is probable that hardware capture is better and more reliable than software capture or, at least, less likely to suffer from extraneous hardware quirks. And then there is MPEG2 and MPEG2, no two being the same.

So, which is better? Yes, one of them

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Brian (the terrible)

PS Sorry for being unhelpful

[This message has been edited by Brian Ellis (edited 12 February 2001).]

[Plane]

Are u mean both G400TV and G450 not a good idea too?

I want to know G400TV MJPEG -> MPEG2 or G450TV -> MPEG2, which one performs better in image quality only.

My city is too difficult to find a h/w MPEG2 card in a reasonable price and I can't find an online shop does ship to my city.

http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wintvpvr_datasheet.htm

[This message has been edited by Plane (edited 12 February 2001).]

[Dr Mordrid]

You can also do G400-TV => YUY2 => MPEG-2 using TMPGEnc and get excellent results.

This can be particularlly effective if you capture the YUY2 files in AVI_IO, edit them in Premiere and export the timeline directly to TMPGEnc using the AVISynth frameserver software (freeware).

The YUY2 files can also be made much smaller by using the HuffYUV lossless compressor during the capture.


Dr. Mordrid




[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 12 February 2001).]

[wkulecz]

I can't claim to have seen them all, but so far none of the consumer priced hardware MPEG encoders can match what I'm getting from HuffYUV captures and encoding with TMPGEnc. But if you need real time, the quality might be acceptable. Buy from a place you can return it if the quality is not up to snuff.

None of the real-time software encoders I've seen comes close to TMPGEnc in quality.

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

I totally agree. IMHO most of the realtime MPEG-1/2 capture gear is more oriented to net or CD usage and not TV destined NLE.

'tis hard to reproduce the quality of a good, configurable encoder like TMPGEnc with realtime encoding. I've been using uncompressed video of one type or another (RGB, YUY2...) for a long time and cannot see how this kind of quality can be produced absent some technology on the board akin to C-Cubes or a bigtime DSP.

C-Cubes major advantage is not only speed but that it can be configured to capture MPEG-2 I-frame video and not just IBP. This makes editing more precise and improves the output quality when it gets converted to IBP. I-frame capability is a big deal.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 12 February 2001).]

[Anatoly Neverov]

However it may be, I wouldn't advice to anybody to edit mpegs. Neither mpeg1 nor mpeg2, IBP, I only... Nothing is better than *.avi for edition. Compressed by HUFFYUV especially. But I'd admit that Matrox mjpeg also isn't the worst thing in the world.

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Anatoly Neverov
Minsk, Belarus