Hardware Capture

[tmac]

Just like to share my experience with Navis Pro capture card. I have been using various analogue capture cards for years with mediocre results. I needed to produce dvd quality caps due to the birth of my grandson and considered the canopus range. Saw the Navis on ebay and got it. A lucky move, as this card captures straight to mpeg2 with no loss of quality to my eye. This model is hard to come by, but I believe the PVR range from Hauppage uses the same hardware. To all those who say uncompressed captures followed by software compression is the way to go, forget it.

[communist]

Originally posted by tmac
this card captures straight to mpeg2 with no loss of quality to my eye

Originally posted by tmac
To all those who say uncompressed captures followed by software compression is the way to go, forget it.

Some people do like to (or need to) heavily filter their stuff. If your source is good and filtering is not that much required you wont have to cap lossless.

Everyone has a different understanding of *quality* so I woulnd say 'forget it' ;)

[killingspree]

hi tmac,

first thanks for sharing your experience with us. i'm sure some users will find it helpfull as i cannot recollect Navis Pro as being well known :)

anyway, to your opinion, as communist stated already, it is not ideal for everyone to capture to mpeg2, either if you are planning on doing some postprocessing (which is necessary in about 99% of all cases - imho at least) or if you are not going for mpeg2 (DVD,SVCD) as your final format. i know a lot of people who capture to huffyuv/mjpeg first and then go for a divx/xvid compressed file as their final result. in those cases it would not make much sense to go for mpeg2 as your intermediate format.

another problem is, that the card you were talking about is rather expensive. not unaffordable for the standard user, but still much more expensive than the average bt8x8 cards, not even speaking about those video capture chips included in ViVo cards. for example i bought by bt8x8 card for less than $15 (used).

just my 2 €-cents
steVe

[Sergei_Esenin]

Editing the MPEG-2 format isn't as straightforward as editing AVI--it takes longer/more processing and fewer apps are available to do it. In addition, many people want to deinterlace and filter some of the material they capture, making capturing to the lossy MPEG-2 less than ideal. Plus, many people prefer to have different destination formants than MPEG-2/DVD. I for one don't care to use such an outdated and lossy format, preferring instead the higher quality and/or lower bitrates afforded by MPEG-4. So, I cap at 720x480 in lossless huffyuv, deinterlace or IVTC, filter if neeeded, and convert to MPEG-4 encoded AVI.

I'm sorry your results with other capture cards were "mediocre," but mine far exceed anything a hardware MPEG-2 card is capable of producing. Many people use and love hardware MPEG-2 capture cards--even the quality freaks at places like AVS Forum often use them for PVR purposes due to their ease of use and flexibility. But if you're willing to put a lot of work into your captures and the learning curve required to make them the best, then you can use a non-hardware-MPEG-2 capture card to great effect, producing caps that a hardware MPEG-2 card can't match.

It's about priorities. If your priority is ease of use or low CPU overhead, hardware MPEG-2 might be your best choice. If your priority is quality and ease of editing, it probably isn't. To each his own. :-)

[tmac]

Guilty as charged. I got a bit giddy having captured my grandson's christening from camcorder then having the dvd produced in a couple of hours. For this type of work it is very good. However I have hit a snag, covered in a different post, so i suppose pride goeth etc.
I have spent many years capping with an ATI card and have used this site extensively. The members here have my utmost respect.

[cweb]

You can have mpeg2 in AVI now using ffvfw so editing is just as easy now.

Originally posted by Sergei_Esenin
Editing the MPEG-2 format isn't as straightforward as editing AVI--it takes longer/more processing and fewer apps are available to do it. In addition, many people want to deinterlace and filter some of the material they capture, making capturing to the lossy MPEG-2 less than ideal. Plus, many people prefer to have different destination formants than MPEG-2/DVD. I for one don't care to use such an outdated and lossy format, preferring instead the higher quality and/or lower bitrates afforded by MPEG-4. So, I cap at 720x480 in lossless huffyuv, deinterlace or IVTC, filter if neeeded, and convert to MPEG-4 encoded AVI.