just a few newbie questions

[brawler]

capturing a movie with a capture card produces the same results as just ripping the dvd to the hard drive?

is it possible to capture a dvd(dvd-9) movie and during the process make the movie smaller so that i can burn it onto a single dvd-r instead of having to encode with a program like Rempeg or CCE?

from what i have been reading it appears that when capturing vhs tapes its possible to improve the video quality to look more like a dvd than a vhs. is this correct?

im mostly concerned about capturing dvd's. im trying to figure out the best way for me to backup my dvd-9 disks to dvd-5 disks without all the extra time needed to encode the video into a smaller size. will a good capture card such as pinnacle's pro one do the job or something along those lines?

thanks for any help.

[Mac Sidewinder]

capturing a movie with a capture card produces the same results as just ripping the dvd to the hard drive?

No. The dvd has a much cleaner video signal. You will introduce noise in the video signal by outputting it to a capture card. With the DVD rip you are manipulating the original and from the capture you will be using a copy of lesser quality.

from what i have been reading it appears that when capturing vhs tapes its possible to improve the video quality to look more like a dvd than a vhs. is this correct?

You can clean up a signal sometimes but you won't get better than the original. You can apply filters to help out but usually at the expense of introducing noise or by smoothing the picture thus loosing definition.

If you have the dvds, then the best way to go would be to learn to rip and encode. With the encoding packages out today, its really not that hard to learn.

Mac

[borchers]

>im mostly concerned about capturing dvd's. im trying to figure out the >best way for me to backup my dvd-9 disks to dvd-5 disks without all the >extra time needed to encode the video into a smaller size. will a good >capture card such as pinnacle's pro one do the job or something along >those lines?

it will probably be able to capture to mpeg2 directly. any normal capture
card and decent cpu will allow you to capture to divx realtime.
But copying and re-encoding and dvd will give much better results.
If you capture it takes time. A fast processor using CCE allows you to
reencode practically in realtime with much better results.

[brawler]

thank you Mac Sidewinder and borchers for the insight i really appreciate it.

[Mac Sidewinder]

No problem - check out the guides section for help. Good luck.

Mac