best Video Capture settings for TV, VCR

earGoggles wrote on 9/25/2001, 11:35 PM

I'm using an ATI All in Wonder 128 PCI 32mb capture card, capturing video from a Sony 8mm camcorder and eventually printing back to VHS. My PC has 384 MB of ram, a 20GB Hard-drive w/ 10GB available, and a PIII 700mhz processor. I've tried several different resolution settings and frame-rate settings but keep getting drop frames "jitters" on playback.

Any suggestions as to a good frame-rate and/or resolution setting for this process? Or any other sugestions to help w/ a smooth playback? Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks much.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 9/26/2001, 6:45 AM

My experience with both the AIW and the Rage Fury Pro VIVO cards
has been that they just can't keep up with the capture process. They
just don't have what it takes.

You might try a resolution of 320x240 and 15 frames per second. This
isn't very high quality, but the card might be able to keep up without
dropping too many frames. I would also suggest capturing to AVI
rather than to MPEG as the compression process takes a lot more
effort.

The biggest difficulty i've had with the ATI cards is that the audio &
video never seem to be in sync. For example, i did a 3 minute capture
and the resulting AVI file was about 2 minutes long, with only about
1 minute of video stretched out to half speed, and large portions of the
audio missing. I get this same result no matter which capture software
i use.

I also have a Hauppauge WinTV card that i picked up at OfficeMax for
$70. I've been able to capture an hour or more at 640x480 30fps with
no dropped frames or jitter. So, i guess my biggest suggestion to you is
to use a different capture card.