Suggestions for VHS capture
 

Hoping for some advice regarding tape video capture.

My capture PC is based around an HP xw9400, ATI PCIe video card (6790 or 6970, can never remember which), and a Matrox RT.X2 (full fat version).

Source is an SVHS VCR, connected via component video.

I want to capture VHS - and possibly some DV cam tapes - to transfer to DVD. There may or may not be some editing/restoring involved.

I'm somewhat disappointed with the RTX2 as a 'capture' card; the only options for file capture are (from top of head) DV, DVCPro, Matrox MPEG-I. I understand I dont want to use DV (4:1:1 reduced colourspace). I tried a VHS tape using MPEG-I. A 1 hour capture was 5GB in size, even at 10MB/sec. And 10/mbit is the minimum capture rate. I'm pretty sure VHS doesnt need 10mb/sec - even broadcast quality video was 2mb/sec (wasn't it?).

Questions:

1. If I use S-VHS, I only get black and white video - and no idea why or how to fix this?

2. Is there any way to use other software to capture via the RTX2? Had a quick look at VirtualDub but it doesn't see any capture device. TMPGenc, perhaps? Or can I persuade Vdub to so so? Or something else?

3. For the tapes I need to 'restore', I should capture uncompressed video. The most I want to do at capture stage is crop/mask the picture to remove bottom picture tearing or ragged right hand image. Simply because its a step saved later, and why capture data I cant' fix and wont be working with... Can I capture uncompressed video with the RTX2?

4. Worst case scenario is the X2 is a bust for capture. My PC is wholly PCIe, what solution would you recommend? VCR->DV Cam-firewire->PC?

Many thanks, and I'll try to remember to upgrade membership this week!

Actually component (YPbPr = 3 cables), or composite?

You're mixing up megabytes and megabits. 10MB/sec * 3600 sec = 36GB. And 2Mbps is ~1/4 DVD quality.

A capture straight to MPEG-2 I-frame at 10Mbps would be worse than DV quality (DV is 2.5x the bitrate using a similar compression scheme; just different colorspace).

Since you said "use" and not "play back" I'm assuming you mean S-Video, not S-VHS tape. Are you using the Y/C breakout cable and connecting it to the correct input jacks?

Attachment 5845

I don't think it provides uncompressed output over the PCIe bus, in which case no. If it provides a direct uncompressed display for delay-free live "Preview" purposes, maybe -- if you try really hard. To work well, it would need to use the regular Windows Driver Model (WDM).

See above.

Compression-wise, that would be worse than higher-bitrate MPEG-2 I-frame.