Using ATI AIW Radeon

tedmarshall wrote on 11/4/2001, 2:53 AM
I own an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon video/capture card and am looking for a decent, reasonably low-priced editing package to use with it. I'm looking at VideoFactory 2.0 and tried the demo, but there are some things that I can't tell with the demo. I have some questions for anyone using this combo (AIW & VF).

VF's capture component seems to capture analog from the AIW ok, except that it seems to only capture as an AVI which severely limits how much I can capture (I need to work at 640x480x30fps at least). Also, VF won't import an mpeg-2 file captured using the ATI utilities. Does this change with the full version?

For that matter, does VF work reasonably well with mpeg-2 video? How much video (at 640x480) can I really work with in say 20GB of disk?

During the capture, the live preview seemed to lose audio sync. Playing back the clip using the preview function, it was hard to tell if things were in sync or not and the demo won't actually generate full-screen output. Are there any audio sync problems?

Any other considerations on this combo?

One more question though this is more of a general question which I could probably answer myself by reading the manual; however, if someone could quickly answer this, I'd appreciate it. Since I'm doing analog capture, I assume that I will end up with several scenes in a clip. What's the best way to separate these into separate clips?

Thanks a lot.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 11/4/2001, 6:55 AM
The first suggestion that most of the people in this forum will give you is
to drop the AIW. It just doesn't seem up to the task of capturing full
frame video at 30fps. If you're serious about doing a lot of good analog
captures, search this forum for the Sony DVMC-DA2 external media
converter. This unit runs circles around the AIW and gives much better
quality captures. It is a little pricey though; the converter costs about
$300, and if you don't already have a firewire port, you'll have to get a
1394 card and a firewire cable for about $70 for the pair.

SonicFoundry's video capture only creates AVI files. I realize that's a
disappointment for you, but the reasoning is that MPEG files are very
inferior for source media. You won't be anywhere near as pleased with
them as you will be using AVI. If you capture to DV AVI (especially
using the Sony converter) you will only need about 220MB per minute,
so you should be able to handle around 45 minutes of files in 10GB.
The amount of MPEG video you can work with depends on the bit rate
you've encoded it with. DVD quality MPEG 2 requires about 73MB per
minute, and the ATI software isn't capable of generating that. About
the best you can get out of the AIW system is 1000Kbps and files at
this rate are scummy indeed.

I don't know what sort of budget you are working with, but 40GB drives
are selling in the $100 range now, and 80GB drives are around $200 to
$250. If you can get the extra drive space, forget capturing in MPEG
and go straight DV AVI. You'll be a lot happier with the result.

Once you've purchased and registered VideoFactory, you will be able to
import and render to MPEG and MPEG 2. This feature, and a few others,
are reserved for registered users.

You didn't list any specs for your system. How fast is your processor?
How much memory do you have? The sync problem you've mentioned
could be that the processor just doesn't have enough spare cycles
during the capture process to keep the preview display in sync. I've
captured two hour long clips and still had perfect sync at the end, but
the preview audio & video would often "stutter" during the capture. You
learn to ignore this after a while.

If you have multiple scenes in a clip, you can seperate them using the
Split function in the edit menu. Place the clip on the time line, position
the cursor between the scenes, and split. You will now have two clips on
the timeline that can be used independantly of each other. You can of
course repeat this as often as you wish. Note however that your source
file hasn't been broken into pieces; what has really happened is that the
source file has now been loaded onto the timeline multiple times, and
trimmed to show just the scene that you've split out.
ScottCargill wrote on 11/4/2001, 10:24 AM
I don't know about the high end that chienworks seems knowledgeable with, but for what I'm doing the ATI and Mpg2 are doing ok..

But then again I haven't had the time to explore what chienworks is talking about yet, I may switch to avi dunnoo...

I can tell you that a few people here are helpfull, but the company that sells the product doesn't support their product worth a poop.

Guess poor service does bite you in the end, cause I'd suggest looking at their competitors products .....

jimcho wrote on 11/5/2001, 3:41 PM
I use the Rage Fury Pro which uses the same capture chip as the AIW Radeon. It's fine for short web videos, but a real pain for high quality VCDs.

Problem 1: 640x480 AVI captures are hideously large, and real-time captures of MPEG2 at the same resolution requires major horsepower. And even if you could capture to MPEG2 at that resolution, the files don't work well with VideoFactory.

Problem 2: AVI captures produce audio and video which are out-of-sync. You can re-sync the audio and video in VideoFactory, but this produces an extra step. I've recently got a 60gig drive dedicated for captures and this seems to have reduced the sync problem to about 1 second for a 10 minute capture.

As chienworks said, you really need to capture to DV for optimal satisfaction. This is leading me to purchase a DV camcorder with analog inputs.

My question is: How does the analog "pass-through" function of a typical camcorder compare with the Sony analog-to-DV converter that has been talked about in this forum? I'm considering the Sony TRV17 or PC9.
Chienworks wrote on 11/7/2001, 11:10 PM
Well, for the Sony cameras, and probably Panasonic and a few others too,
the "pass through" circuitry is probably the same thing that Sony puts
in the DVMC-DA2 converter. Once they get a chipset that works well,
they'll use it in as many different products as possible.

Be wary and read the specs carefully though. Several people have
mentioned in this forum that the analog inputs on the camera they got
only work for recording and don't pass through. They've had to record
their video to DV tape in the camera first, then play back the DV tape
to capture through firewire. Not a major problem, but it is an extra step
and doubles the length of time needed to capture.