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On Tue, 7 Aug 2001 10:42:32 +0300, Timchenko Maxim
<[log in to unmask]> posted article
<[log in to unmask]>,
which said:

> Yes.  A VHS camcorder is not likely to have Firewire ports, but it
> should have audio/video outputs.  They can be hooked to any card
> that allows video capture from that source.
>
> The card is either an analog-video-editing card (such as Pinnacle
> Studios' DC10-plus), but that's semiprofessional and as such quite
> expensive ($200 over here).

I use a Hauppauge WinTV 404, which is no longer made.  It has been
replaced by newer models.  But people tell me that my videos look
better than anybody else's.  Of course, that has more to do with the
source material than with the capture card itself, I think.  Since I
capture from a digital satellite system and not a VHS video tape, the
quality is going to be better.  Of course, C-Band analog source is
always the best that can be had, no matter what the so-called experts
say.  Digital satellite uses MPEG2 compression.  C-Band is pure,
uncompressed analog quality which is what the big guys use as their
source material before they send it to us.  It is the best quality
you can get.

> A much cheaper and almost same-quality-and-features solution is a
> TV board (it allows you to watch TV on your PC) which has a capture
> option, such as Lifeview FlyVideo 98 (~$60).  It can capture
> Hi8-quality video (better than VHS...). You'll need the card, also
> any sound card (TV boards capture sound with the help of sound
> card, not by themselves), a reasonably fast PC (400 MHz will let
> you capture at VHS quality, 800 MHz -> almost the best).

Actually I have not found that CPU speed affects video quality at
all.  Hard drive speed is where you get better quality due to the
fact that you won't drop frames.  When I had a 4800 RPM drive in my
old Packard Bell with a Pentium 150 non MMX, I could only capture
160x120 without dropping frames and even then I had to reboot to
clear the resources.  After upgrading to a 7200RPM drive, I was able
to capture 320x240 BTUYV formatted video (compressed somwhat on the
fly) without dropping frames.  I never tried 24-bit on a Pentium 150,
but the quality is not affected by the CPU unless you're trying to
capture directly to MPEG1/MPEG2 or unless you're talking about
possible dropped frames.  Again, I didn't have problems with dropped
frames on a P150 with an ATA-66 7200RPM hard drive.

> Good (fast and large) hard drive is important, especially on not
> very fast PCs.  Uncompressed videos which I capture are 2Gb for 10
> minutes (my PC is not fast enough to compress on the fly with the
> quality I want :( ), so you should have a lot of free hard disk
> space before you start.

I capture 24-bit 320x240 and it only takes about 5 minutes of video
to hit 2 gigs, IIRC.

> There's a lot of software, some of it is freeware, some not.
> VirtualDub is the best choice for compressing and filtering, as
> well as an
> excellent capture program.  Adobe Premiere is the premier :)
> solution for non-linear editing, but there are other cheaper
> options out there.

An excellent and free video editor I like very much is called
AVIUtil, which is available at .... well, the place I downloaded it
from no longer has it. :-\  I really enjoy this free editor and if
you want it, e-mail me directly and I can send it to you.  It's one
of the easier editors to use because you don't have to sync the
audio/video and when you make edits, the cuts are made on both the
audio and video tracks.  It sure saves the hassle of having to resync
everything the way you must do on those mult-million dollar packages,
it seems.  AVIUtil is only a 342k download, but it's great.  It also
has enhancement filters for noise, blur, sharpness, saturation,
etc....


<anecdote>
...and what I do, since I have a setup that seems to "crackle" when I
capture both video and sound at the same time... I capture video and
sound together, edit out what I don't want, which usually includes
clipping the beginning and the end of the clip, and then I save the
audio portion of the file as a wav.  Then I capture the audio by
itself.  If I capture audio alone, there are no crackles.  I then
open both files together in WaveStudio that came with my SBLive so I
can see a visual representation of the audio.  I can then perfectly
match the files and trim the unecessary portions off the clean audio
file, import it into the AVI, save, and then I have a perfect video
file with a perfect audio track.  If I tried to do that on some
other, more expensive programs, I'd be ripping my hair out before I
could get their overcomplicated software to do what I wish.
</anecdote>

Ethan

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