ATI TV Wonder USB for video game footage capture?
 

I am trying to capture footage from my old Famicom using a TV Wonder USB 2.0. When I try capturing at 60fps VirtualDub starts inserting lots of frames. If I capture at 30fps the footage looks fine and no frames are inserted, but of course as the Famicom runs 60fps this creates issues. On games such as Mega Man the character will sometimes disappear as he is flashing on frames that aren't being captured. Any advice would be appreciated, thanks!

Wonder if the 240p is confusing it? Other idea is that the famicom might be a PAL version that outputs less frames per second? Also, NTSC units would output 29.97 frames/59.94fields, so you'd see frame insertion from that too if you are trying to capture at 30 or 60 frames per second.

The character disappearing is almost certainly the unit not correctly handling 240p. If you want to fix it the easy way, you could use a line doubler like the Retrotink, though then you'd need to capture via HDMI.

That ATI USB is a good card for videotapes. But not video games. Both may have "video" in the name, but any video is not any video. Video games are essentially generated/fake video output, as compared to analog broadcast/tape signals. That can matter for digital ingest. Certain capture cards and TBCs will balk, have issues, as it's not expected source.

This is a situation where I'd look into one of the Retrotink units.

I actually have the Retrotink 2X. The problem is that I can't get it to play nice with my Intensity Shuttle. I would like to capture the footage either as a ProRes on my Mac using Premiere or I can use VirtualDub to capture an AVI on my Windows XP machine as well. I'm not sure what kind of capture card to get because for whatever reason it just won't work with the Intensity Shuttle. Perhaps the Retrotink 5X would work better? But I don't want to upgrade if it will just be the same issue. Any advice would be appreciated, many thanks!

Hmm. I could have sworn people used the 2x with HDMI capture devices pretty often, so I was not sure what the issue there was. I was going to suggest considering the AJA Ki Pro which can record HDMI, Component, or SDI to ProRes422 as a standalone device onto SSDs. I then checked the specs and it doesn't mention 480p as a supported resolution which is what the Retrotink 2x outputs. Turns out 480p is an odd resolution to capture for capture cards apparently. The other devices that I know can do that can directly store as 422 are the Blackmagic Hyperdeck products, but checked the manual for that and it also doesn't list 480p as a supported resolution. Most capture cards seem to consider HD to start at 720p at the lowest it turns out.

So in that case, you probably needs something that can upscale 3x or more. The Retrotink 5x can do that and I would bet that the intensity shuttle then works fine with a 720p or higher signal. Only other issue I could foresee is that your games are most likely 4:3 aspect ratio so you may have to mess with the aspect ratio after the capture.

I did see a site about 480p capture and it claimed the Intensity shuttle could do that, but looking in the manual and there's no mention of 480p as a supported resolution, so that's probably the issue.

The Shuttle captures 720 by 486.

My shuttle wouldn’t work in Vdub and I later read that the shuttle is incompatible with virtualdub. I don’t know if Vdub is ideal for game capture. Everything in it seems soo focused on analog tape formats. I believe the Shuttle is also incompatible with M1 and M2 Macs.

I’m guessing you are using an old version of Premier because they don’t have a capture function anymore.

It’s a good idea to check for compatibility before you buy a card.

You will probably get better recommendations for hardware and software for capturing gaming content on a different forum that is more geared towards game capture.

I asked in the Retrotink forum, and they suggested a Magewell capture card. It arrived today, and I tested it out with the Retrotink 2X. It does capture the footage, but through OBS at least it is still a little choppy. But, it also looks slightly different than footage captured before with my ATI card. Now I am feeling unsure as to which is actually the correct aspect ratio. The footage captured from the Magewell card is 1920x1080 (square pixels) with OBS, while the footage captured from the ATI is 720x480 (DV pixels) with VirtualDub. They are both blown up to 1920x1080 so you can directly compare, I am attaching screenshots for reference. Any advice would be appreciated!

And now I have found yet a third option, not sure how it was captured but I was comparing to a creator on YouTube and I took a screenshot and it looks yet still different than either of the ones I captured. I am more concerned with getting the frame to look exactly right than the framerate... please advise, thanks!

The final aspect ratio should most likely be 4:3, so you could take a piece of paper and cut it to the size you're seeing on screen, then measure the vertical height and divide that by 3. If you multiply that number by 4, that's what the horizontal length of your paper should be.