Dazzle DVC100 higher quality than ATI AIW?
2 Attachment(s)
Hi,
in my process to restore old footage from Hi8 and VHS, I stumbled into this forum and quickly found out that it is probably the most informative source for digitizing video on the internet with many experts on the subject, so I decided to share my probably controversial findings: I already had a Dazzle DVC100, but after days of going through the posts on how to setup capturing, I decided to go with the ATI AIW card, as they were recommended almost everywhere on this site, whereas the Dazzle ones were shunned upon. I bought an old ATI AIW 128 Pro for next to nothing on local auction site, and put it into my Win XP system I still had laying around. After capturing about ten hours of content on the ATI, I tried to capture few minutes of the same tape on my Dazzle too, expecting a huge difference in terms of quality between them. And it was there, just in the opposite way then I would have guessed. To my eye, the footage from the Dazzle seems a lot crispier, with less chroma noise and more detail. The AIW also uses unsolicited crop of the left side of the image. The only negative thing I can say about the Dazzle is that it seems to overexpose a bit. I am attaching the same frame from both devices for a comparison. The biggest difference can be seen on the date watermark in the bottom right corner, where the ATI is much blurrier and contains chroma fringing. Another huge quality issue is the horizontal lining on the sky in the chroma spectrum. The loss of detail can be noticed on the bird in the center at the top of the image. I played around with the images, and noticed that if you decompose the image to an actual Y Cb Cr layers, you can see that the chroma values are clearly the originators of the problems, especially the horizontal lining. That doesn't mean that the luma is without an issues either, as the loss of detail applies here, too. The provided footage is from a basic, but newer VHS player, captured through composite with VirtualDub 1.9.11 (almost default settings, no post-processing filters) and encoded with Lagarith YUV2 codec (lossless so no compression difference there). Both cards were capturing in their native resolutions, so 704x576 for the ATI and 720x576 for the Dazzle (yes my source is PAL). The pictures provided are not de-interlaced. I also captured some more material from Hi8 camera through S-Video, but the difference between the two cards seems to be much smaller there - no more noisy chroma a low detail luma, just a little different brightness levels, hard to tell which one is better - the ATI seems to crush blacks, whereas the Dazzle crushes whites. One thing to note is that I don't have the official cable adapter for the ATI card, so I soldered a spare composite/S-Video cable directly onto the card based on the pinout provided online. I double checked everything is conducting as it should, both the shielding and the signal wires itself. Is it possible that the ATI card is truly lower quality? From what I understood on this site, it may be one of the eldest capture cards, but it has the Rage Theater chipset the same as some newer models, and the difference between Rage 200 (that the newer ATI AIW cards have) was said to be only in terms of hardware encoder for MPEG2 (that I don't use). My theories for discussion why this could be, in no particular order:
Which option do you think it is? Please provide your opinions and/or ideas how to improve the quality. Thank you. |
It's the later AIW cards that some people her like afaik - though they won't handle video direct from the VCR well regardless. The Dazzle is a bit better at that specifically. You really want to pass the video via a tbc or dvd-recorder with tbc functionality or similar for stabilization before the capture card discussed a million times here.
Differences between cards will be smaller with s-video since the card doesn't have to dealing with separating luma and chroma. If it's a newer hi8 camcorder it will have a TBC function as well so the cards won't have to deal with unstable timing either and the differences will be pretty small. If you are getting crushed whites/blacks you want to adjust the capture card level/contrast settings to avoid it. Using virtualdub's histogram function is helpful for that. |
Wow thanks for your quick reply.
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So the Dazzle has a better comb filter. That's nice to know.
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Welcome. :)
Dazzle better than ATI AIW? No, not even close. For starters, your Dazzle image is blown out, overexposed. Yuck. Quote:
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All ATI AIW Radeon cards? Absolutely not. Quote:
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That purple dongle was less than $10 on eBay. Quote:
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Not any random gear, but recommended specific brands/models (and conditions) of each. The real rabbit holes are things like Avisynth. Easy to get sucked in, sidetracked. Quote:
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