newbie to DV

[Jotarou]

Hi,


Since there isn't any guide to DV capturing, and I am a newbie to it, I would appreciate any help I could get. I have a Canopus ADVC-100, and I want to use it to capture my laser disk, then using CCE, encode it. If possible, I would like the best quality possible. Would this be raw AVI? And would Adobe Premiere be a good program to capture with? Thanks in advance for any help.

JoJo

[bb]

Hi Jotarou,

I guess your Canopus ADVC-100 is a DV camcorder. If you capture your DV data stream through firewire, then you'll get either a type-1 or a type-2 AVI file, which is not "raw" RGB AVI, but compressed 5:1.

If you have the choice, use type-2, because you can process it directly in VirtualDub including the audio. Else you have to process the audio separately.

What is your target format? DivX? MPEG2?

If you can connect your Laserdisc to a TV-in socket (graphics card or TV card), then an analogue capture might give better results. In this case I recommend using Huffyuv or MJPEG during capture, then encode to the desired format (Huffyuv is lossless and leads to better results, but needs big HDD).

I hope this will help you as a starting point.

bb

[Jotarou]

Hi,

Thanks for the advice. The Canopus ADVC-100 is a analog to digital converter. You can check out the specs of it here:
http://www.canopus.com/ppt_advc100.htm

Basically, I want to capture my laser disk using the ADVC-100 using firewire. I got Ulead Video Studio that came with my firewire card and it lets me capture as DV type 1 or DV type 2.

I connect my laser disk player into the ADVC-100 using svideo cable.
Thanks for the pointers. I will try to locate Huffyuv. Any more pointers is much appreciated.


JoJo



Originally posted by bb
Hi Jotarou,

I guess your Canopus ADVC-100 is a DV camcorder. If you capture your DV data stream through firewire, then you'll get either a type-1 or a type-2 AVI file, which is not "raw" RGB AVI, but compressed 5:1.

If you have the choice, use type-2, because you can process it directly in VirtualDub including the audio. Else you have to process the audio separately.

What is your target format? DivX? MPEG2?

If you can connect your Laserdisc to a TV-in socket (graphics card or TV card), then an analogue capture might give better results. In this case I recommend using Huffyuv or MJPEG during capture, then encode to the desired format (Huffyuv is lossless and leads to better results, but needs big HDD).

I hope this will help you as a starting point.

bb

[bb]

Huffyuv (free):
http://math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/huffyuv.html

PicVideo MJPEG (best MJPEG codec, $18 non-commercial use):
http://www.jpg.com/video/mjpeg.htm

If you don't have a DV codec on your system, you might want to try the Mainconcept codec. The free trial decodes fine, but adds a watermark when encoding. As you want to decode only, this is no problem.

http://www.mainconcept.com/de/download/download.shtml


Open your DV type-2 video in VirtualDub, add some smoother/denoiser filter, maybe a resize filter, and encode to your favourite video and audio formats.

bb

[Jotarou]

Okay, I have a few more questions. I hope you don't mind answering them. I converted my DV type 1 file into a DV type 2 file using Edit Studio. Isn't type 2 supposed to have a video and a audio separate? I get the AVI file when I convert it, but it still has sound. What do I need to demux and get the sound?

When I port my newly converted DV type 2 file into Virtual Dub, then add the filters and stuff I want, and cut out the end segment I don't need (I let it capture too far, so I cut out the extra stuff). Now I want to encode with CCE (TMPEGnc is way too slow for me, and won't let me do more than 2 pass VBR). How do I do this so I keep all my filters intact? I can't seem to frame serve.

And finally what about the sound that I cut out. Will my video still be in sync?

Once I got these few questions answered, I think I will know what to do. Thanks in advance.


JoJo







Originally posted by bb
Huffyuv (free):
http://math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/huffyuv.html

PicVideo MJPEG (best MJPEG codec, $18 non-commercial use):
http://www.jpg.com/video/mjpeg.htm

If you don't have a DV codec on your system, you might want to try the Mainconcept codec. The free trial decodes fine, but adds a watermark when encoding. As you want to decode only, this is no problem.

http://www.mainconcept.com/de/download/download.shtml


Open your DV type-2 video in VirtualDub, add some smoother/denoiser filter, maybe a resize filter, and encode to your favourite video and audio formats.

bb

[bb]

DV type-2 AVI is a container with two standard streams: vids and auds. Like in type-1, vids contains video and audio intermuxed. auds contains a copy of the audio data (that's the reason why type-2 files are bigger than type-1), but as it's in the auds stream where VfW applications expect it to be, VirtualDub can deal with it. If you want the sound in a separate WAV file, use VirtualDub's "Save WAV" command. It will save the audio according to your cuts, so there shouldn't be a synch issue.

I'd encode only the video in CCE, because there are better audio encoders than the one integrated into CCE (I recommend BeSweet). You can open the AVI directly in CCE - provided that you have a DV codec installed. See doom9's CCE guide. You can also use AviSynth to filter and frame serve, but I must admit that I don't know yet how to frame server from VirtualDub into CCE. If you have the HDD space you can save your VDub filtered AVI using Huffyuv, then open it in CCE. For AviSynth you have to use CCE 2.50.

If your target is SVCD, you might also want to try DVD2SVCD: it has an AVI2SVCD option.

bb

[Jotarou]

Thanks, and please check your PM.

[ozmale]

G,day all.

DVD's are my past history and have had great sucess with all the guides etc and as a result am good with most of the tools.

However. reading all of the posts above I am missing something. My task is to convert all my Star Trek Voyager Tapes to SVCD. (you can now laugh).

I am capturing them in DV (Digital Video) using scenalyzer and a pinnacle DV500 card. I have no idea if the result is Type 1 or 2. The resulting AVI file has no dropped frames and appears to be excellent quality. It can be converted into the most perfect quality SVCD with Canopus Procoder, But procoder is too expensive and I only have the Demo version.

So, CCE is my next best option since I am into quality and don't care how long it takes. The problem is the the video must be resized to 480x576 (PAL) before applying to CCE. And I understand CCE does not do a good job on the audio.

I am not after detailed steps but a very general guide and tools list of the major steps I should follow.

Many thanks
Ozmale