Which configuration setting is the best?

[narcis79]

I have an analogic camera Hitachi VM-H765LE (pretty old) a Pinnacle PCTV tuner (stereo, radio, year 2002), a AMD Barthon 2600+, 512M and the HDD available up to 100G free. I usually capture in DV format then edit and compress to MPEG2 format for DVD burning. Both capturing and corpessing I do it in Pinnacle Studio because the codec seems to have the smoothest image of all. I tried Sony Vegas but it boosts up some brightness without even applying any filters and the human faces shines pretty bad in this case. So...

1. I want to know what setting for capturing the video first is the best?
- RGB24
- YUY2
- YV12
2. Capure framesize (i'm interested only in PAL)
- 720x576
- 768x576
3. What capture software?
- Pinnacle Studio
- Adobe Premiere
- Virtual Dub
- iuVCR

Or what do you reccomend based on the hardware I own, and don't start telling me that I need to get a DV camera or something else. if you want please just help me with what I got so far. I just don't see the difference between the color formats so I would like to know which one is more suitable for me (RGB24, YUY2, YV12). Thanks

[Guest]

Which configuration setting is the best? Please read and follow forum rules, specifically, rule 12: do not ask what's best. Thank you.

http://forum.doom9.org/forum-rules.htm

[bb]

[...]
1. I want to know what setting for capturing the video first is the best?
- RGB24
- YUY2
- YV12
2. Capure framesize (i'm interested only in PAL)
- 720x576
- 768x576
3. What capture software?
- Pinnacle Studio
- Adobe Premiere
- Virtual Dub
- iuVCR
[...]
Hi narcis79,

I can't tell you what's "best" - as neuron2 stated, there's no such thing as the "best setting". You may appreciate my recommendations, though.

1. I'd do all analogue capturing in YUY2, MJPEG or HuffYUV codec. DV is not bad for the purpose either, especially with hardware support, e.g. Canopus ADVC-xxx.
Depending on the kind of post processing you desire, DV may be the best choice, as it is supported by all NLE programs.

2. Depends on your capture device and codec. For perfect aspect ratio you may have to crop a 720x576 capture to 704x576 - refer to the excellent analogue capture guide from this site. DV is strictly 720x576.

3. For analogue capture I prefer iuVCR from your list. VirtualDub is excellent for VfW based captures, whereas iuVCR uses the DirectShow interface. I have no experience in using NLE software like Pinnacle Studio and such for capturing purposes.

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[Boulder]

3. VDub 1.6.x can also do DirectShow capturing :)

[bb]

Thanks, Boulder. I knew there was an enhancement to VirtualDub in that area, but I wasn't sure whether this was still in experimental state or not. I haven't done analogue captures for a while now, so I guess I'm not up to date.

At least I do know that there were major improvements to VirtualDub in the DV area recently :)

bb