ClassVcd has been a member since early 2003, and made his first post only yesterday, after more than two years of lurking. To date, that has been 9 posts, all on the same day. All 9 have been advertising the same three videohelp guides. I can't speak to the value (or even applicability) of the recommended guide, but I can speak to the process that was recommeded.
- Capturing into an MPEG-4 codec -- with the intent to post-process -- is not best practice. MPEG codecs are lossy, and a process that introduces additional loss (such as his recommended analog -> MPEG-4 -> MPEG-2 process) would not meet most members' image quality needs.
If you take a look at
Doom9's collection of capture guides, you'll find our analog guide that discusses capturing to lossless avi with a typical PCI capture card. Chapter 8 of that guide discusses encoding and authoring DVD during post-processing. You'll also find DV -> DVD and DVB -> DVD guides at the same link, should you elect to use either a digital camcorder or digital broadcast signals in your process. These latter have their own forums -- see this
Announcement for more info.
There are some cards that do
hardware MPEG-2 capture, such as the ADVC that Ron mentioned.
But the typical PCI capture card does not include hardware MPEG-2 encoding. These cards usually include packaged softare that will do software MPEG-2 encoding; usually, these software solutions are inadequate -- either they introduce excessive dropped frames or significantly low bitrates, or both. In addition, these prevent further image manipulation without loss.
Over the years, we have found that lossless capture followed by postprocess encoding provides both high quality and image control, which is why the analog guide recommends it with typical low cost (non-H/W MPEG-2 encoding) PCI cards, or the typical VIVO video card.