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Thread ID: 30831 2003-03-04 08:12:00 TV Capture - too grainy udaman (3284) Press F1
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125463 2003-03-04 08:12:00 I want to put home video clips onto VCD using my existing equipment. All my pics are grainy when captured. Is it possible to get them with better resolution so that they are the same as when played thru the TV?

If so, what do I need?

I have Compaq 133MHz, 64MB RAM.
Dynamax HI REZ Plus TV capture card(made in 1995)
Windows 95
VCR is a Panasonic camera.

I have used three kinds of software:
the Dynamax capture software, AVI_IO, and Virtualdub,

and they all give the same graininess. 		udaman (3284)
125464 2003-03-04 08:16:00 You really need a minimum of a P2 300Mhz with 64MB RAM pushing it.. 128 giving better quality, and 256 being optimal!

And if 95 handles it, driver-wise, then why not stick with that too :-)

It could simply be though that your settings need tweaking, but Im not too much of an expert.

You'd wanna capture at a res of 320x240 on anything lower than a 500Mhz, or 640x480 if your PC is faster!

Anybody else care to comment on those specs?


Cheers


Chilling_Silence 		Chilling_Silence (9)
125465 2003-03-04 08:51:00 I've got plenty of time so if the low spec PC is just slower then it's OK.

I've tried capturing on the small screen sizes but the graininess doesn't change. I thought it would cuz there's a smaller pic.

Could someone explain what the higher spec PC does that requires more grunt?

udaman 		udaman (3284)
125466 2003-03-05 01:27:00 Probably not. While things will improve with a better capture card, better cabling, better VCR etc, there is not much you can do to get round this.

The computer monitor will make the image look a lot worse than on the television as it wont bleed the image to smooth things out.
The PAL video source is 320x288, but capturing at a higher res and recompressing back down to 320x288 may offer slightly better quality too. Find out if you capture card can support 25 frames per second at 640x480.

Due to the specs of your machine being so low it is highly likely that your card does realtime hardware mpeg compression which may be the cause of a lot of your quality loss.

Raw capture takes *at least* 1-2 megabytes per second of disk space. A raw capture and then slow high quality mpeg compression would the the best way to make your VCDs if possible. Of couse you're likely to run out of disk space quite quickly at those data rates on a computer like yours. This is why top quality video capture may require a very powerful computer. 		BIFF (1)
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