Favorite capture settings (from codec - filter settings)

[Ookami]

Hello,

after the chat with Koepi here, I thought this could be an interesting discussion. Everyone is invited, only postings like "I do huffyuv" or "Divx ;-) direct capture rulez" are not getting us anywhere . Please, post all the infos and we can have an interesting discussion...

Thanks.

I will post some of my standard settings today or tommorow.

Cheers,

Ookie.

[Scuba]

My favorit is capturing Uncompressd 4:2:2 YUV.
Files are huge but when quality is what matters you can't beat it.
I am lucky to have a computer that can actually do it, as it'a not cheep. Not the card (T3K) and not tha Massive raid needed to handle all the data.
Don't try it at home as it's a work computer, not a privet one.

[Koepi]

*sigh* Do I really have t post my latest settings here?

Well, I don't own a big, expansive computer, I have a Duron700 with a KT133 chipset based mainboard (at least I got the memory running at 133MHz 2 months back, after nearly a whole year not succeeding with this).

My TV card is a cheap relabeled AverMedia TV Phone 98 w/ VCR. (Medion 9592 if somebody cares First I had a Flyvideo98 (mono), then I tried a relabeled FylVideo98 Stereo(this time Lifetec 9542),but never got satisfied with "stereo" sound - finally it works like charme ).

On Win98, I installed the VxD drivers since those gave me the freedom to do full-res capturing without any additional work (the WDM drivers SUCK!). Too bad I hadn't those drivers back with my older cards, since these drivers have some mmx-optimized dll's that can directly produce stereo sound out of the bt878 chip. Well, I think I get really off.-topic here, feel free to shorten this mail, Ookami.

On Win2k, which I prefer BIG time for capturing and editing/encoding/developing video(codecs) , I use the free driver from btwincap.sourceforge.net .

So finally I capture at 640x576 with virtualdub. Compressing with picvideo MJPEG at qual. 15, 4/1/1 subsampling (I don't have much free space...).

Postprocessing afterwoods:
1) Deinterlace
2) Crop
3) Temporal Cleaner, settings adaptive to the noisyness of the movie.(it's developed from the builtin temporal smoother and works better in terms of quality. No ghost artefacts when settings are choosen wise).
4) Bilinear resize (smoothes out some residue noise/glitches).

Finally, compressing that to XviD.
My next capture will be with sound post processing as well:

1) Saving sound to wav from chained avi.
2) using CoolEdit (or Soundforge, whatever you like more) to do a normalize to 100%.
3) applying a hiss reduction on that signal (good preview function for that in cool edit).
4) Saving that file, muxing with virtualdub, compressing to mp3. OR: usig graph-edit, dumping the avi into an ogg, compressing the sound to vorbis, dumping that into the ogg as well

Sorry for this long post, but you asked for it

Best Regards,
Koepi

[Ookami]

First, thanks to Scuba and Koepi for posting in this thread.

Scuba... capturing Uncompressd 4:2:2 YUV .

Koepi, that's the type of posting I want. Informative. Thanks. And -> THIS <- is a long post =:-) .

BTW, I have too the #&$#(&$ KT133 chipset. When I use the latency patch my system "hangs up" very often . Without it, I have quite alot other problems... Is there a good reliable, chipset (something stable like the good old BX for Intel CPU's) for my Thunderbird 850 ? If someone knows a good chipset and/or motherboard, please PM or e-mail me. I have the Asus A7V and I'm disappointed by the southbridge bug and other issues. Do you have any probs? *sigh* Whatever...

Ok, here are some of my settings:

VERY LOW or LOW QUALITY

* Direct Divx ;-) capture -> RealMedia

I use this method when I have:

-very low disk space
-no need for good quality
-the end filesize should be very small

+352x288
+CD quality sound
+a low KF settings, so you can cut out the commercials etc.
+bitrate, mostly I use 6000, altough it's never used at such a low res. and you will waste much of it if you stick with this file (if you don't transcode it to RM)...

Ok, after the cutting with VD, I mostly apply the resizing filter (320x240) in VD (precise bicubic) and sometimes even some noise reduction filter. After that everything is ready for frameserving to the RealMedia Producer.

RM settings:

single rate; 512 bitrate; audio depends, mostly music; sharpest image video, 2 pass VBR

After that you have a file with a quality that makes Doom9 sick .

I've encoded quite a few episodes (mostly Sledge Hammer) with that. But, you'll have to move away from your monitor to look at that ;-) .

I know that lossy->lossy (especially if you use Divx ;-) direct capture) transcoding is crap, and that this is really low quality. But like I said, if you have very low space and can live with such low quality, why not?

HIGH QUALITY

* MPJEG capture -> Divx ;-) etc.

I use this method when I have:

-to record a longer movie or episode
-the need for good quality

+704x576
+CD quality sound
+minimum Picvideo setting of 17, 4-1-1

Deinterlace and precise bicubic resizing. Mostly I use CBR Divx ;-) with a bitrate that is higher than 2000 at the res. of 512x384. For audio I use WMA. Hehehe... For audio I use 128 CBR MP3, no ABR, VBR hacks, please. When the MCF or OGG container format is ready and supported by VirtualDub I will go for that, before that I won't.

I stopped to do noise reduction if I record directly from my tuner, since the quality is already amazing (for me, that is) and I have a rather slow PC. I do noise reduction for old movies etc. (all of you know "Prosjaci i sinovi" ) only.

BEST QUALITY

*Huffyuv capture -> Divx ;-) etc.

I use this method when I have:

-I have spaaaaaaaaaaaaace on my HD's
-the need for the best quality

When I capture with Huffy, I always do filtering, as huffy is my way to go for VHS (SVHS) captures. I have very good results with Hawk's capture guide. The methods from Genesis, Kika, Fish and the other Ultimateboard guys are also very good. It also, always depends on many factors, like I wrote in a recent thread.

So these are roughly my main categories where I can fit in every of my caps :-) . Right now, I'm playing with some other codecs ;-) .

Thank you for your input. More input is welcome and wanted!

Cheers,

Ookami.

[Zhnujm]

most times i use following settings:

capture:
-768x576 YUV2
-mainactor mjpeg quality 90%
-16bit 44.1khz stereo

clean source:
-telecide filter
-cropping
-divx4.12 1-pass

not so clean source:
-telecide filter
-cropping
-temporal cleaner
-divx4.12 1-pass

really bad source (my old vhs tapes )
-telecide filter
-cropping
-temporal cleaner
-smoother
-divx4.12 1-pass

for audio i use always 128kbit mp3.

but these settings will change when i get my dvb card next week.

[Kb_cruncher]

i use avi_io with picvid mjpeg set to 18or19.
i capture at 512x384 and encode to DivX.
what filters i use depends on the quality of the source,but mostly temporal cleaner and crop\resize with soft bicubic.

my system
---------
p3 coppermine@702mhz
intel zx440 chipset(msi)
256mb pc100 ram
voodoo3 2000 8mb
averymedia(bt878)capture card
2xhd 1-15gb & 1-30gb
creative 1371 sound(did u know this chip supports 5.1DD,disabled in driver).

note:don,t use voodoo cards with bt chip,they don't play well together.

there are quite a few comments on the wdm drivers for the bt chipset
for win2k\xp.the Averymedia website has win2k drivers that work wonderfully in most capture resolutions.

[Scuba]

It's a question of what you are doing.

For Event editing like weddings, corporate events and such we are using MJpeg at 3.5Mbit video with Uncompressd audio at 44.1Khz 16Bit. The system in question is based on a Dual 750Mhz on BX mobo and have hardware exceleration to make it work fast.
Output is to VHS in most (if not all) cases.

For DVD's and such I use a Pinnacle DC2000, capturing directly to mpg2 at 6Mbit CBR with Uncompressd audio.
Normaly I after compress the audio to .AC3 stereo using SoftEncode.
This is based on a Asus A7V with 1G Athlon.
I have found the problem with the A7V to be the second PCI slot and as long as I don't use it my system work fine.
I don't even need to run the PPE - PCI slot enhancer.
I use both the chipset IDE and the Promise ATA100, as well as Creative Live, Adaptec 19160, 3Com nic and the DC2000 itself.

If I need to go to CD-Roms I use the same computer capturing at 15Mbit and compressing to Mpg1 using TmpgEnc at very high quality. I don't go to DviX as it's not fully supported on all clients computers, and as my clients are not that smart I can't start get them into installing new codecs.
The Exact Mpg1 settings depend on how long is the project.

The valhala of systems we are using for small productions, clips and such that need to be at very high quality.
System is based on a Pinnacle Targa 3000 running on a dual Xeon 1Ghz.
The T3K card can capture directly to YUV 4:2:2 uncompressd, Mpg2 I-Frame up to 50Mbit or DV.
It can edit all this 3 in real time and also 32Bit Uncopressd AVI, all on the same time line.
Last one is important if you have animations from 3D-Max or after effects. you can just drop them on the itme line and work.
It also have a animation recorder so you can preview the stuff you are rendering in 3d-Max, Combustion, After Effects, Commotion and such in real time on a TV monitor.
The T3K also have a Mpg2 transcoding utility to encode from all this sources to Mpg2 in real time. Quality was compaird by some to CinemaCraft. I wrote a article on it at my site (Targa Mpg works article).
Again it's a professional grade system with a price tag of a car. We had to take a bank loan to buy it.

My job is technical person to the small studio I work at.
I also some times do jobs for a big Pinnacle resaler here and that gives me access to all the new stuff.

Small tip,
In the BIOS is a settings for PCI Latency Timer. In most cases this is set by default to 32. In most cases Changing this one to 64 will make your capture card life much easyer.

For the best possible quality I use uncompressed YUY2 @ 720x480. I also use Huffyuv and PicVideo Mjpeg(setting 19). I can also capture to Mpeg2 @ 15000 bitrate and 720x480. I have had good success capturing straight to DivX(KS VKI MPEG4 V3, 6000bitrate 320x240). If capture to say Huffyuv I encode to DivX using Nandub and use certain filters if there needed. I always Smart Deinterlace and Precise Bilinear Resize and crop. And will use Temporal Smoother and Smart Smoother lowest setting and Warp Sharp if needed to clean up noise or if I used a low bitrate for fitting a 2hr movie to 1cd. I can capture to Mpeg1 VCD and WMV and Realmedia. I would rather capture using Huffyuv and then encode it to VCD compliant using TMPGEnc. As for WMV its crap and not worth your time. Realmedia is not good for nothing either except maybe cartoons. Even then I would rather use DivX.

If the Rage3D forums ever get back up and working I will post the link to the thread I started there for Video capture and software and guides. See my Sig for details about my computer.

[bb]

To those who *ALWAYS* deinterlace: sometimes analogue TV is transmitted progressively. In these cases there's no need for telecide or deinterlace filters.

For PAL the sources are often phase shifted only, so you don't need a real deinterlacer which would degrade quality. Use telecide in such cases.

Personally I use several combinations of filters depending on the source. Denoising is very important, but you have to try a lot to get good results. I often use Dynamic Noise Reduction (the scriptable version by Donald Graft, threshold of 8 most of the time), TemporalSmoother with max. threshold of 2, TemporalCleaner with lower settings than the default (of course not together with TemporalSmoother), SmartSmoother.

I discovered that decreasing brightness in the source settings of my WinTV resulted in a better picture quality and _much less noise_. The default settings (128 brightness, contrast, and saturation) result in a too bright picture in my case. I decrease brightness to 120 or 118, and increase saturation to 132.

(Still have to try the sourceforge.net drivers.)

bb

[Koepi]

I finetuned my capture settings...

704x576 is the capture resolution now.

..

To odd that the signal I receive here is soooo noisy. I have to apply very high filter setings (still temporal cleaner) to get something that is a little compressable (and watchable).
I tried bb's phase shifting stuff but didn't find any uninterlaced stuff yet where it works - so it's still deinterlace (blend) for me.
and to make that really horrible, I need a bilinear resize afterwoods as well... so the picture isn't too crispy anymore, but the quality is ok (midrange, but WAY better than VHS).

Regards,
Koepi

EDIT:

P.S.: if you're living in germany then the sourceforge drivers will only give you the whole picture if you choose PAL_B as TV norm. [i even have to choose it with amcap first, after that I can capture with cdub - didn't try it directly in vdub yet] - else you would get a stretched and cut off picture)

[theoneyouknowleast]

640x480 Mjpeg at 19
CD Quality Sound
in v.dub usinf vfw drivers
win2k

Filter in V.dub
2d cleaner
delinterlace area based
smart smoother
temporal smoother
resize precise bicubic a=0.6 to 512x384

save to huffy

2 pass divx4 at 2100 and mp3 cbr 128kbit

I only really cap cartoons, like simpsons, since my cable isn't the best, and my sys is too slow to figure the right combination for live action with out me colapsing of old age

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Abit BP6
Dual Celeron 433@433
2x Globewin Fop32 HSF
512 MB
Asus 7100 Pure Geforce 2 MX (running in AGP 1x, issue with not enough power supply my mobo for power hungry card in agp 2x mode)
2 Nic
Adaptec 2906 SCSI-2 Card (for burner and scanner)
SB Live II value
Wintv Tv Capture Card
Maxtor 30GB HD 7200 ATA100 (replaced the failed 75GXP)
Maxtor 40GB HD 7200 ATA100
Fuji 13GB HD 5400 ATA33
Yamaha 6x SCSI-2 Burner
Creative 6x DVD Drive.
2x 60MM Case Fan

[Darksoul71]

Hi all !

My PC config:

-Athlon 1.7 XP
-Epox 8KHA+
-256 MB PC266 RAM
-Asus V6600 Deluxe
-SB Live Value
-Electronic Design AV Toaster (Zoran based hardware MJPEG card)
-1x40 Gig WD 5400 RPM capture drive
-Win98 SE (DX8.1)
-Liveware 3.0
-Asus Detonator 21.83

Capture Settings:
Video: 720x576 PAL at 4-6 MB/s MJPEG (with AV Toaster)
(previously 704x576 Huffyuv (with Asus V6600))
Audio: 44.1 kHz/16 Bit/Stereo
using VDub or AVI_IO

Filter & encoding settings:
-Cropping away any black bars and corrupted parts of the image

-Deinterlacing using Smart Deinterlace

-Using GKnot to calculate the exact crop and resize parameters for this res

-resizing to 640x??? using AVISynth´s BiCubic
-Denoising by using AVISynth TemporalSmoother(3-4) and SmartSmoother with low radius

-Encoding using VDub´s Fast Recompress to DivX4.12 2Pass (without Log File tools)

-Cleaning up and normalizing audio with CoolEdit 2k

-Encoding audio to ABR MP3 using LAME

-Muxing and splitting AVI with Nandub

I target for aprox. 90 min per CD. Depending on VHS quality (I archive my old VHS tapes) and
action level of the movie I sometimes only store 60 min per CD.
Quality is above VHS level after denoising.

BTW: I don´t find any difference between the movies I encoded with Huffyuv source and those I encoded using 4-6 MB MJPEG as codec.


-D$

[theoneyouknowleast]

Originally posted by Darksoul71

BTW: I don´t find any difference between the movies I encoded with Huffyuv source and those I encoded using 4-6 MB MJPEG as codec.

withe resize and filtering you do, It would be hard to find a diffrence. I cap to mjpeg only due to file size constratiants. I used to do 320x240 huffy with myu previous cap card. if you we using low bitrate of 500 to encode, and capped at a small res, you would see a diff though.

[Darksoul71]

@ theoneyouknowleast:
Please note, that I´m aware of recompression artefacts when using software MJPEG codecs. I´ve used the Mainconcept codec for a long time. There you´re right. There you can clearly see differences between MJPEG and Huffyuv.

But my hardware based MJPEG card was pretty pricey (mucho $$$ ) and has some better ADC than the most VIO graphic adapters have. I know how to judge video quality and as I said before:

I don´t find any difference between the movies I encoded with Huffyuv source and those I encoded using 4-6 MB MJPEG as codec.

Just my two cents,
D$

[anarco]

- athlon xp 1800 / asus 8200 TI200 deluxe

- picvideo mjpeg at quality 19 or 18

this is good enough for VHS stuff and consumes only about 10GB
for 60 minutes movie

IMHO raw capturing is pointless for VHS to (s)VCD purposes, the
aliased downscaling will fix most mjpeg scattering anyway
and I don´t have harddisk space for RAW besides the ASUS 8200
is sweating when doing ~5MB/s rates ;-)

- best capture application I used was freeVCR
(does flawless 704x576 capture)
- removing noise from audio is done by cooledit

[Darksoul71]

@anarco:
What OS and driver version are you using ?
Are you using the WDM drivers from NVidia or the older VfW ?

cu,
D$

[anarco]

I´m using win2k and the nVidia set...
just make changes to the nVidia WDM drivers before installing

like:
-----
The following was supplied by Dr|zzt:
Now find the "nvxbar.INF" in the folder you extracted the WDM's to (you might have to set explorer to not hide system files) open it up with notepad and scroll down to the bottom. The 3rd and 2nd last lines should look like this:
NVxbar.DeviceDesc="nVidia WDM A/V Crossbar"
NVxbar.Crossbar="nVidia WDM A/V Crossbar"

Change them to this:
NVxbar.DeviceDesc="ASUS WDM A/V Crossbar"
NVxbar.Crossbar="ASUS WDM A/V Crossbar"
-----

I have some results achieved with these settings on my page...
there are also other drivers with comparable rates

[Darksoul71]

Hi !

Thanx for answering.
I was just asking because I could only choose 352x288 as max PAL capture res for my Asus V6600 Deluxe when I tried the latest WDM driver from Asus although the most modern VIO graphic adapters have a Philips chip.

So 720x576 as max PAL res should work for me if I buy an Asus V8200 Deluxe, shouldn´t it ?

-D$

[anarco]

someone achieved 480x756 with a ASUS 7100
what chipset is the 6600 ?

I heard the chipset for capturing is the same on most ASUS cards though...


but to answer your question... yes you may capture up to 720x576
without sync problems with that card .. at least on an athlon 1800 XP and above it should work ;-)

maybe take a look at the technogarb forum at www.maxreboot.com
there are plenty of asus users

[Ookami]

*BUMP*

480x576 with a Asus card? How? I thought all the Asus cards have the same chip? I have the old Asus 3800 . I hope I can play Warcraft 3 when it comes out...