Building a digitising machine?
 

Hello,

I have a windows XP (SP2) machine that I use for digitising that is starting to run slow and generally become less reliable.

It runs Intel Core 2 Quad CPU
Q6600 @ 2.40ghz (3.25GB of RAM)

I'm running a Matrox RTX100 capture card but I also have a Canopus ADVC 300. The Matrox needs to run Premiere Pro 2 and XP to work but I believe the Canopus is more compatible with more modern builds.

My question is, can I buy a faster machine and install XP without any compatibly issues? Or should I just buy a faster machine with Win 7 or 10 and find software to run my Canopus ADVC 300. I've heard Virtual Dub and Sclive are good.

What spec machines are other people running?

Many thanks,

Ollie

With Matrox RTX100 you can capture with VDub in Huffy 4:2:2. Obviously with the drivers correctly installed.
Premiere is needed if you want directly capture in mpeg2 or DV, via analog input.

Ok, that's good to know. So do you recommend VDub? I've never heard of a Huffy video file before. Is it recognised by most video conversion software programmes, so as to convert to mpg4? Thanks

I should probably mention my graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce 6800Ultra

For the Canopus you can use any modern system that you can fit a firewire pcie card in really, and use WinDV on modern windows or DVGrab on Linux.

Matrox card is PCI so unless it can work in a pci->pcie bridge under winxp you are generally not going to find anything newer than e.g socket LGA 1155 motherboards that it could run on which could be a bit faster than a core quad.

Unless it's having issues that core quad setup should be more than plenty for capturing though, unless you want to do editing/post processing on the same computer.

Something is being overlooked here:
The Canopus ADVC-300 box is craptastic, and should be avoided. It is infamous for "doing stuff" (forced filtering, even when supposedly "off") to lower the video quality, even beyond standard DV loss (cooking color, tossing out 50%+ color/chroma data, etc). For PAL, the 50/55/100/110 was tolerable at DV (4:2:0, comparable to DVD-Video loss), for NTSC not. But the 300 is bad, period.

Matrox is PCI, and there are motherboard from Gigabyte from 2017, using 7th gen Intel (including i7-7700K), that can work with WinXP Integral Edition (community/fan edition, patched and backported for modern use, not something official).

But capture doesn't really matter for CPU, graphics, RAM, as long as you hit minimums. And anything since about 2009 is guaranteed to hit the minimums.

Use VirtualDub, and Huffyuv is a lossless codec saved inside the AVI wrapper.

I may want to reply again, but wanted to point these items out quickly.

Bearing in mind what Lordsmurf said about the -300, add WinDV to the software for DV "capture" (or more correctly, "transfer").

Thanks for all your messages.

It's very interesting because I've run this sideline of converting videos for over 10 years now but I've never spoken to other people about their set up.

So it sounds like my set up is pretty much there, I may well set up a second machine for busy periods, because as you know, you can't speed up the process of converting videos!

The thing that really slows up my process is burning DVDs, occasionally people still want DVDs, which means I can't digitise and burning an hour long avi takes a couple of hours. Maybe I should capture in a different video format? I can't complain though, 10 years ago, everyone want a DVD burnt!

The issue my machine has at the moment, is that the screen occasionally turns off but it's not a screen saver, and I can't get the screen to come back on my touching the keyboard or mouse. It will generally come back on when it feels like it. Any body know what's causing this?

As for the Canopus ADVC 300, I ran a side by side test with the Matrox RTX100 and couldn't notice any difference, certainly a customer wouldn't.

Hmmm, think my screen issue was the monitor itself. Running it through another one and so far so good.

For the occasional dvd request having a standalone dvd-recorder set up in addition to the normal capture can be an option, at least for shorter tapes where you don't have to drop the bitrate (for squeezing in longer recordings there is much more advantage to doing the mpeg2 encoding from a file capture since it can do variable bit more much more effectively as it's not real time). Depends on the rest of the setup whether you can plug that into an extra output without issues or not though. Then you can let it capture to a dvd at the same time as the normal capture.

Not a bad idea, I'm thinking of building another machine with the Canopus, WinDV and VirtualDub.

I will try mpeg2 for my next DVD burn. The issue is the people that want DVDs also want the digital file and my memory of the mpeg2 capture was that it wasn't great quality.

Can you recommend any open source DVD burning software?

With RTX100 you can directly capture in mpeg2 (both CBR & VBR max 10000Mbit/s), but only with Premiere.
Matrox RTX100 use LSI chip for realtime encoding, which makes it an acceptable option.

The only complication is that Premiere capture audio separately and uncompressed (linear PCM), so is needed compress audio to mp2 and mux with video file, in format m2v, outputted by Premiere.

That's a good idea here, as PAL DV won't really cause loss in conversion to DVD-Video MPEG-2 (unlike NTSC 4:1:1 > 4:2:0). And no real need to capture 4:2:2 for quick DVDs.

But again, ADVC-300, so many issues there.

Can anyone recommend a good PCI capture card on this thread?

Also, does anyone here capture directly to mp4?

Thanks