ATI capture AVI for CCE

[dvd_maniac]

I was wondering if someone that has done this could help me out.
I have ATI AIW 9700 Pro using MMC 8.5 to capture.
I have until now been capturing my movies in mpeg-2 format and simply using that to author my dvd's with. I am getting sick of the poor quality it produces and would like to know the proccess of capturing in huffy and using that AVI to import into CCE to get dvd compliant video. I have CCE 2.66. Please, anyone that has done this, help me out...
Also would like detailed settings of template in CCE as I am NO expert with this program. I mainly use it in conjuction with dvd2svcd.

[Kedirekin]

I don't have the AIW 9700, but I've done quite a few captures using an old STB TV card and a Haupauge WinTV card. It's all pretty simple when you break it down into steps, and everything you need to know about capture is out on the net. One of my favorite sites was Luke's Video Guide (http://www.lukesvideo.com/). There is also the capture forum in this (Doom9's) board.

Huffy is a great codec for capture, but the file sizes can get a little outrageous. MJPEG is another good codec for capture - fast and high quality (though not lossless like huffy) - and the file sizes can be ½ to ¼ the size of huffy, depending on what compression level you select. There are also wavelet codecs, though in my opinion they have no advantage over MJPEG.

Once you have the capture as an AVI, encoding it is dead simple. Just load the AVI into CCE, change whatever settings, and hit encode.

As far as I'm concerned the hardest part of the whole process is pre-processing your AVI before encoding. For example, cutting out commercials, applying Smart Smoother and temporal filter to get rid of broadcast noise, applying IVTC if appropriate. You can spend hours fine tuning things to get the best quality in this step.

[dvd_maniac]

I am capturing off my digital cable and directv sat. I have over 300GB free space, so I would rather use Huffy. I am only looking to do this AVI method with movies, so cutting out commercials is not neccesary. I am not looking to get into filters yet either. Just looking to get a little better quality then capping striaght to mpeg-2. So preparing the source is not an issue. What I am looking for is what settings to put into CCE for converting them.

[Boulder]

Originally posted by dvd_maniac
I was wondering if someone that has done this could help me out.
I have ATI AIW 9700 Pro using MMC 8.5 to capture.
I have until now been capturing my movies in mpeg-2 format and simply using that to author my dvd's with. I am getting sick of the poor quality it produces and would like to know the proccess of capturing in huffy and using that AVI to import into CCE to get dvd compliant video. I have CCE 2.66. Please, anyone that has done this, help me out...
Also would like detailed settings of template in CCE as I am NO expert with this program. I mainly use it in conjuction with dvd2svcd.

You could check Doom9's capture guide, it includes an Avisynth post-processing tutorial. You can then frameserve the video via the script to CCE and encode to MPEG-2. What comes to learning how to use CCE, just read the threads here;)

[dvd_maniac]

I've read the capture guide a few times. However it really just pertains to capturing for dixv, vcd compression. I would like to be able to capture for dvd compliant videos as my final resulting file. This is where I get confused. I am not asking someone to rewrite the guide just for me. I am simply asking if there is someone who already does this process and can lead me in the right directions. I tried to capture a 720x480 huffy 2.2 avi with 48khz 16 bit stereo. I then used dvd2svcd (avi2dvd mode) to convert them to dvd. The capture was flawless. Excellent quality, a/v was perfectly synced. However, the avi2dvd result, also tried Tempgenc, was about 1 second out of sync. This is where My main problem lies at this point. The only thing I can think of is that my version of Huffy is a ccesp-patched version. I don't know if this could be the problem or not though.
If I could get the sync issue resolved I would be all set. Also, MMC doesn't allow me to cap at 352x480, is this a better resolution to cap at for dvd? and if so, what program should I use to cap?

[Boulder]

Originally posted by dvd_maniac
I've read the capture guide a few times. However it really just pertains to capturing for dixv, vcd compression. I would like to be able to capture for dvd compliant videos as my final resulting file. This is where I get confused. I am not asking someone to rewrite the guide just for me. I am simply asking if there is someone who already does this process and can lead me in the right directions. I tried to capture a 720x480 huffy 2.2 avi with 48khz 16 bit stereo. I then used dvd2svcd (avi2dvd mode) to convert them to dvd. The capture was flawless. Excellent quality, a/v was perfectly synced. However, the avi2dvd result, also tried Tempgenc, was about 1 second out of sync. This is where My main problem lies at this point. The only thing I can think of is that my version of Huffy is a ccesp-patched version. I don't know if this could be the problem or not though.
If I could get the sync issue resolved I would be all set. Also, MMC doesn't allow me to cap at 352x480, is this a better resolution to cap at for dvd? and if so, what program should I use to cap?

The basic setting is the same. You'll just have to remember a couple of things to keep your project within the DVD standards. Firstly, you've captured at the correct resolution, but you can also use 704x480 if you wish to have some extra bitrate for the film pixels. The specs allow some other resolutions too, 352x240/288 and 352x480/576 are also allowed IIRC but with these you'll lose sharpness quite a lot compared to the higher resolution. Your audio settings are DVD compliant already.

Always try to capture at 720x480 even if your final resolution would be lower. You'll get more information for the resizer to work on and there'll be less noise too. VirtualDubMod is _the_ program to use if you can use VfW drivers (preferable). If you have to use WDM drivers, choose VirtualVCR. You can also try the BTWinCap drivers to capture in VirtualDubMod but I'm not sure if they'll support your card.

About the sync issue, have you tried encoding to DivX/XviD and if you have, was the sync OK? I've done probably hundreds of captures to VCD, SVCD, XVCD and DVDs and if the source has had perfect a/v sync, the final file has been fine too. The patched Huffy codec shouldn't be a problem.