Capture frustrations.....

[gator222]

Dell 4600C, AIW 9000, XP Media Center, Movie Studio, MyDVD, ATI MMC, TMPEGAuthor and Encode.

Analog capture: have seen a number of posts about flickering at the top of the monitor frame, and how this is due to "overscan". Many have commented that this won't show up on the captured video; it does on mine, significantly. Same tape, same player plays fine on a TV, but the captured video has an intermittant white flicker at the top of the screen, and frequent flickers througout the screen. I've also tried two different VCR's with the same result, and I've tried to capture with Movie Studio, MyDVD and ATI MMC, all with the same results. These flickers are visible when recorded on a DVD. I've downloaded the most recent drivers and patches that I can find on the Dell website. By exclusion, this appears to be a capture card issue, but the AIW is supposed to be a top quality card. Anybody have any suggestions? I realize there is a possibility that someone will suggest buying a new Panasonic VCR, but I'd rather not, so I'm hoping someone will come up with some other ideas.....Rick

[mustardman]

If you are getting frequent flickers throughout the frame (which aren't on the TV) then it is really likely that your capture card is crook (or not set up properly) or your PC is not set up properly. I assume the "4600C" refers to the CPU speed, which is certainly fast enough. However, test the sustained hard disk speed with a utility (from the web).

If this is the case, it could also be the cause of the flickering at the top of the image. Particulary check the frame rate and video dimensions match your area (PAL/NTSC).

I know a guy who did a lot of PAL captures using NTSC settings. It worked, and he thought it looked good, but I thought it looked like crap (the clips "staggered").

[gator222]

It's a new Dell 4600C with Pentium 4, 2.6 Ghz. I can easily burn DVDs without a problem. Just can't capture. I'll check the HD speed, but I doubt that is the problem. I have tried PAL capture; doesn't help, but I appreciate the suggestions....Rick

[mordant]

If you are using the ATI software to capture one of the settings is "capture cropped video". This might get rid of the flicker as it removes some of the noise in the overscan area. Or you could capture to AVI first with Virtualdub and then encode the video to DVD format with TMPGenc. When you do the encode you can manaually crop the flicker area using the crop function in TMPGenc.

[mustardman]

A remote possibility is that the flickering at the top of the capture is actually the teletext data. I would doubt this considerably, as it is several lines above the actual start of any picture content, and no consumer video capture devices I know of will grab it. Maybe your card has a fault (or bad drivers)?

[Arachnotron]

If you are in PAL country, the WSS (wide screen signalling) signal might end up in the first line of the cap. But this is not really troublesome since it is only one scanline.

There is an example in the cap guide. The examples in the part about using avisynth to ajust brightness show the wss signal.

Flickers in the top and bottom of the cap can happen with tape; on TV they fall in the overscan area and are ignored. You can play a bit with the tracking of the VCR, but for the rest just crop them and letterbox the thing before creating the MPEG2.

Flickers in the other part of the pic can have many causes. It may simply be a bad tape. Or interference. Or latency problems. Or.. or...

Could you supply us with a screendump?