New User Capture Quality Question

ADinelt wrote on 11/22/2003, 6:33 PM
Hi everyone!

I bought a Pinnacle DC10plus, Motion-JPEG Video IO Board about a month and a half ago to copy a ton of family videos we have and preserve them.
The capture board came with Studio 8 and the initial tests that I did in capturing video were quite good, video quality wise that is. The software in general was extremely buggy and unstable which prompted me to search out other software. After recommendations from this forum, I downloaded Video Factory 2.0c, was extremely happy with the stability and have since ordered my copy of Screenblast 3.0.

Now the dilema. I have completely removed Studio 8, along with all of the other demo packages I was trying. When I try to capture video now through Video Factory 2.0c, I am getting poor quality on the captured video. It is like the two vertical fields are not in sync and I get an almost shutter like effect in fast moving scenes where it appears to flip between the two fields.

The following are the settings for the capture board:
Horizontal: Full resolution
Vertical: Both fields
Cropping: TV
Frame Size: 608 x 464
Data Rate: 1500

I have an all-in-one MSI mainboard with a PIII 650 CPU and 128 meg of RAM. The on-board video and sound are VIA Tech VT8361/VT8601 Graphics Controller and VIA AC'97 Audio Controller (WDM).

I have tried playing with the data rate going all the way down to 500 and up to 5000. Other than getting very grainy or very blocky, the shutter effect is still there.

When I set Vertical to One field, the shutter effect goes away, but the resolution drops down to something like 320 x 240. I would really like to capture at a higher resolution again in order to preserve the old tapes.

I have tried capturing from my old Kyocera Video 8 camcorder and two Sony VHS players and experience the same effect on both.

I am not sure if this is a problem with incompatability between the different software packages or what has happened. If anyone out there has any suggestions or tips, it would be greatly appreciated by this new user!

Thanks very much in advance...
Al

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 11/22/2003, 7:43 PM
It sounds like you're capturing in MPEG, MJPEG, or some similar compressed format. Can you try capturing in AVI instead. This should improve the quality greatly. I don't know if it will help the stuttering problem though.
ADinelt wrote on 11/22/2003, 8:26 PM
The video is being captured in a .avi file, not an mpg or mpeg.

Do you know if there is a setting in Video Factory to switch between the two formats, or is that directly controlled through the capture board?

Oh, and as a sidenote, I tried to print to tape and the tape came out entirely black with no sound on it. I made sure the video recorder was set on line input and the video and audio were set to the line in. I am using the demo version of 2.0c. Would the print to tape be crippled the same as saving projects? Not a big problem if it is as I should have Screenblast 3.0 on Monday or Tuesday.

Thanks...
Al
JohnnyRoy wrote on 11/22/2003, 9:27 PM
The Pinnacle DC10+ card is proprietary and only works with the Pinnacle Studio software for capture and print-to-tape. (I’ve had one for several years and was very impressed with the quality) So you need to reinstall Studio 8 just to capture your video or to print your video back to tape (if you’re not making DVD’s.). The DC10 card captures interlaced video upper field first while DV is lower field first. This is probably why you’re having this field order problem.

You can do all of your editing with Screenblast Movie Studio, which is where you’ll spend most of your time anyway. Just save your work as an MJPEG AVI file and drop it on the Studio timeline to print back to tape. If I were you, I’d be making DVD’s instead. You can get a Pioneer 106 DVD-/+RW for around $140 these days.

~jr
ADinelt wrote on 11/23/2003, 9:32 AM
Thanks for the info JohnnyRoy. What a drag about the DC10plus being propietary to Pinnacle. It got to a point where just doing a stop capture in Studio 8 would completely hang my PC even though the video and audio were still playing on it. The keyboard and mouse were just absolutely toast.

When it comes to preserving the family videos, they will be going to DVD. I was trying out the print to tape for my son's school projects. He is 12 and has so far done 2 video projects using our 8mm camcorder and then copying to VHS (which is common in his school). I was hoping he could bring his projects onto the PC, add titles and polish it before putting back onto VHS tape.

Thanks again...
Al
Chienworks wrote on 11/23/2003, 12:32 PM
Most likely the captures are MJPEG files which have an extension of .avi. The 1,500 data rate is very low for more normal types of .avi files. A DV file from a digital camcorder will have a data rate of 25,000 just for the video, and an uncompressed file (depending on the format) may run over 240,000. Even at the 5,000 upper rate you've tried your captures are still very compressed.
Former user wrote on 11/24/2003, 7:09 AM
The DCo10plus also captures at Upper Field First most of the time.

Dave T2
ADinelt wrote on 11/26/2003, 5:03 AM
I received my copy of Screenblast 3.0 two days ago and have been playing with it. It has hung twice when I start the capture program... not sure why though. Once, an error window appeared referring to sbvidcap30 before it hung.

As for the capture quality, I found that if I capture both frames so the resolution is at the highest (7?? x 4??), the video has the shuttering effect. If I then render the video again as an .avi file in DV NTSC format, the final product is rock solid with no ill effects. The resulting .avi file is twice as large as the captured video though. It seems like a bit of extra work, but the results are well worth it. And thankfully, the rendering time is pretty quick compared to Studio 8!!

Also, if I try to render the original captured file to mpeg 1 or 2, the resulting file has both audio and video corruption. But if I render the DV NTSC .avi file in mpeg1 or 2, it is fine.

One more thing, MyDVD will not work with the original captured .avi file, but does work with the DV NTSC .avi file.

Once again, I would like to thank everyone who replied to my question. Your help was invaluable and the response was amazingly fast!!

It is great to belong to a forum like this where people are willing to provide their time, insight and experience to help us newbies. Hopefully, as I gain more experience, I will be able to provide help to others as you have done here.

Thanks again...
Al