S-VHS-C Capture

[PJLS]

Hello,

I am very new to video capture and I also have to admit this is forum thing is a first as well. I purchased a Dell with a Pentium 4 at 2.66GHz a few months back. I have a JVC S-VHS-C Camcorder with load of tapes that I wanted to transfer to DVD. When I purcahsed the Dell I opted for a DVD-R and the AIW Radeon 9000 Pro Card. I am running the latest driver for the card, and Direct-X 9.0b. I am also running MMC 8.8. Here is my problem. When I first attached my JVC to the computer (S-Video connection)to capture video I thought I noticed that the Video I was viewing with the "TV" software from ATI looked kinda crappy. I know not a very technical term but stay with me. I didn't think much of it. I captured the video using some basic capture settings and burned a DVD. I then brought it to my SONY TV and played it and it still looked quite poor. My TV allows for side by side video viewing from different inputs so I connected my JVC (S-video) to the Sony TV and then cued the tape to the exact sequence as the DVD and compared. The results were night and day. The video from the JVC was much sharper, the colors more vivid and vibrant and there was no subjectivity as to which video was better. I thought it may have been my capture settings so I read lordsmurfs articles and altered these settings accordingly and still the same problem. I then jacked up the bit rate to max and the resolution to max (30 seconds of video 30,000K) and still the JVC looked better.

1. Am I doing something wrong or is this the way captured video is?
2. Is there something wrong with my AIW?
3. Is there any way to keep writing to a DVD-R disc. I have wasted 3 of them now testing different capture settings.

Thanks in advance for your insight.
PJL

[admin]

My first suggestion is uninstall ATI MMC 8.8 and use either ATI MMC 8.1 or 8.7. The version 8.8 was only around for a month, and was known to have many flaws, bad quality included.

The 8.9 is not proven to be much better. It is essentially the 8.8 fix ... try it if you want, some like it, most do not.

ATI MMC 8.7 is one of the most stable versions.

See if that can offer any improvements.

[indolikaa]

Hello PJLS.

1) You are definitely doing something wrong. Captured video will be comparable to the original source if done correctly. I do it all the time, from DVD down to VCD.

2) The AIW is probably fine. I suspected MMC 8.8 as soon as you mentioned it.

3) This is a very good reason to invest in a couple of DVD-RW discs.