Rockovids' advice makes some good points and reflects widespread practice recommended for capturing and digitizing analog tape. Your Dell 4600 is quite adequate for the task -- I have one of those myself and capture tape on it with an ATI AIW 7500 AGP. No problems. I'd suggest that you upgrade to 2GB RAM if you can -- not absolutely necessary for capture itself but handy for further processing, file transfer/copying, and other video work. XP is recommended not only for its compatibility with the best of the analog capture devices but also because hundreds of high quality, free and paid video apps are still available for it. Even if you could get a Win7 or Win8 PC for capture (not that easy), most of the utilities you'd use for post-processing will not work in later Windows, and most post-processing as depicted in this and other forums works with 32-bit plugins anyway.
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Originally Posted by johnny7
I need suggestions on first, an AGP based capture card I can use and find for cheap on ebay. I also need a decent sound card compatible with windows XP, and finally some sort of PCI based GPU since I had to pull the original AGP one out. I have an ancient one from 2001 that works, how important is a GPU in the process of capturing analog video?
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"GPU processing" isn't used for what you intend to do and in fact isn't very good compared to discrete encoding and processing apps. An AGP graphics card is used to feed your monitor. If your capture device was an ATI AIW AGP card, you'd have a full-service all-in-one graphics adapter and capture card in one unit. The ATI 600 USB does not use GPU processing and is a capture-only device. Using it, you'd still need an AGP graphics adapter for that Dell and your monitor.
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Originally Posted by johnny7
Would putting together a system be too much trouble/money compared to just waiting for an ATI 600 to pop up on ebay? How much better output will I be getting from using an older setup?
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It's not a question of "better" but of convenience and flexibility. Any PC system can clean up analog defects and encode a final delivery video, but beyond XP the choices are far more limited for capture and post-processing. The first time you capture a tape you'll be shocked at the amount of noise, spots, stains, chroma disturbances and other problems you'll get from analog tape. When you play a tape directly through your TV you're in the analog domain from start to finish. With capture, your analog source enters the digital world, which is ruthlessly unforgiving when it comes to noise and the unstable character of analog tape playback. Your camera supposedly has a line tbc built-in for what are known as scanline sync problems, and the AVT-8710 is used to correct frame-to-frame sync anomalies. Digital capture and encoding devices don't correct for these problems -- they just ingest what they see and digitaize those analog waveforms, distortions, glitches, and everything else.
Because of the nature of analog video, for best results you wouldn't capture directly to lossy encoded formats. We all know that it's easier and quicker to record a tape directly to MPEG or some other lossy encode, but that method is loaded with problems. Lossy encoded formats aren't designed for corrections, cleanup, or editing. They're called final delivery formats, "final" meaning that making corrections is not part of the final delivey game play. Final delivery is for playback, not for re-processing. Analog tape is best captured to lossless media in a YUY2 colorspace using lossless compressors like
huffyuv or Lagarith to reduce file size without lossy compression. YUY2 is a colorspace that most closely resembles the video storage system used in analog tape. The YUY2 video is stored as decoded AVI, which is simply a wrapper for the video content. Most would use
VirtualDub for capture software. You won't need the ATI MMC application that comes with ATI software. All you'll use are the basic capture drivers.
VirtualDub is a good choice for lossless capture.
Furthermore, lossless capture is suited specifically for corrective and editing work. You can modify and change lossless video again and again into new working files with no quality or data loss -- which is not possible with final delivery formats. Three other problems occur with capturing directly to lossy formats: first, lossy encoding makes a mess of analog noise and defects, so the results will look worse than the source. Second, once those defects are imbedded as digital artifacts, they're extremely difficult if not impossible to correct. Third, you'll get better loooking encodes with discrete encoders than you'll get with "auto" encoders.
Lossless capture with
huffyuv or other lossless compressors and standard definition video takes about 30GB of storage per hour. Capture to lossy DV-AVI, which is not recommended for analog sources, would still use about 25GB per hour, isn't easy to clean up, has easily visible compression artifacts, and would still have to be lossy re-encoded a second time for anything other than PC-only playback, with added loss from the second compression stage.
While the ATI 600 USB is getting tough to find, the input adapters are often sold separately. There's also a similar device, the Diamond Multimedia ATI TV Wonder HD 600 (and it's not "HD" by the way. That's just marketing hype). You have an AGP motherboard, so it's possible to find an ATI All In Wonder AGP card. The AIW 7500, 9600XT and 9600-Pro are favorites, not easy to find, and most owners who still use them are reluctant to let them go. Forum posts reveal that the 9600 and 9700 have RF interference problems.
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Originally Posted by johnny7
I also have one more question regarding audio capture. Many of the capture cards I see have RCA input so why is it that I need to use a dedicated sound card, is the quality just a lot better and preferred with those?
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A dedicated sound card is superior. No contest. There are plenty of SoundBlaster PCI cards around -- not the very best, but still a big improvement over onboard sound cards and more than adequate for analog capture.
VHS transfer ain't as easy or as dumbed-down as mass consumer blogs make it out to be. The boys at Cyberlink/Pinnacle like to use words like "professional" in their ads, but there's no truth to it. Analog capture is usually cleaned up and prepped for encoding with free apps like Avisynth and Virtualdub. A high-priced "Pro" NLE like those from SONY and Adobe are fine for "editing" and special effects but even the pros who use them work with lossless media, not with pre-encoded video. The only NLE I use is Adobe AfterEffects, mostly for color correction with ColorFinesse and timeline edits with lossless video. NLE's can't be used for repair of analog noise and defects -- they weren't designed for it. Avisynth and VirtualDub together have some 400 filters available, all the corrective filters and color correction you'll ever need. For analog tape you'll need both apps. You'll see the necessity for those tools the first time you see a capture. For later encoding, most people use stand-alone encoders like TMPGEnc, the free HCenc, or GUI's for the X264 encoder. If you wish you can get into much higher prices for encoders, but there's a heavy learning curve and you pay for many features you'll never use.
I capture with AIW 7500 and 9600XT cards on XP machines. The captures are reviewed for any problems, then transferred to external hard drives. Those drives make it possible to work with those files on my other PCs that have updated CPU's and XP or Win7 for post-processing and encoding. I still use XP, and I also process HD on that newer machine with XP.