VC500 clips superblacks, but not in XP?
 

Hi, I've been speaking with MsGohan and Sanlyn.
I was directed to keep my questions in the public forum, and not PM.

So here goes.

MsGohan reports that the VC500 clips superblacks when using its proprietary EZGrabber:
"Full access to the VC500's proc amp is only possible on WinXP..Ez Grabber causes superblacks to be clipped, at least for me. They're still clipped after closing the program. Unplugging and replugging the VC500 restores them but sets the Proc Amp back to VDub's settings instead of the tweaked one."

So the catch22 is, you can't set the ProcAmp properly prior to capture, outside of using WinXP.

Sanlyn proposed a "temporary work-around" where you invoke the AV8710 TBC between output of the VHS or Laserdisc player and the input of the cap card, upticking the brightness a bit on the 8710 to compensate for the clipped blacks the VC500 will do for every capture. But I would have to do this for each and every capture ad-infinitum, since I don't have XP installed.

It's been almost a year since some of those comments were made and I was wondering if there was any new insight since then.
I really don't want to have to install XP (and I've been having tons of trouble trying to get a dual boot setup on a SATA drive w/USB!)

Thoughts?

The images and histograms posted in an earlier thread compared super-black clipping with non-clipping. You've seen these same posts earlier: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...html#post43951. Those photos show rich blacks with a spike for the y=zero black borders at below y=16. I don't know about others' experience with the VC500, but I've used it with XP and the EZGrabber's proc amp controls with no fancy procedures except to set suitable capture histogram levels. I don't have any saved Win7 captures with the VC500 -- Win7 is too much of a pain in the butt to use for capture and seems to get everything wrong and placed in too many hidden areas, so I lost patience capturing with it. I did some video work with Win7 in the past, but now I just use Win7 for the internet and photo work. If Win7 did cause the VC500 to clip superblacks, I must not have noticed because I don't recall having to work on the problem.

There are other images from this same thread that you might recall, showing the ATI600 clipping below y-16, and examples have appeared in other posts with the ATI600 and another device (I think it was the the Hauppauge Live-USB). The workaround discussed seems to work for other users, even if you have some tweaking to do in post processing. But you have to post process anyway with almost every analog source.

The key word here is full BTW. Brightness and Contrast are the two controls that you can access directly on Win7 and newer.

Here is an earlier quote of mine.

You'd only notice the problem if you used Ez Grabber at that time.

I used Virtualdub.