home made videos - how?

[thastarter]

I have a VHSC camera with composite video out, an analog capture card based on Conexant's Bt878A chip with composite video in and s-video in, and Adobe Premiere Pro.
So, i want to produce home-made (music) videos, ment to be viewed on TV (PAL). I need a advice from experienced man, about how i should capture with Virtualdub, compress and export videos.
What frame size to capture, which codec (Huffyuv or Picvideo), interlaced or progressive in order to get the best results out of this "equipment"???
I have captured with 352x288 25fps and made nice videos, and when i capture to full PAL, i get fields in the video. How i can take advantage of the fields?

[mustardman]

Your proposed destination is TV : Try to stay interlaced, as that is what your camera will be recording.

Resolution : Go for 768x576 (MJPEG at 5:1 or less). Do not use a vertical resolution other than 576 or you will get interlacing artifacts. And x288 you will drop every second field - bad. You have to think about your destination (TV)!

No experience with BT cards, but the "full PAL" should come in as frames (each consisting of two fields). If you are seeing the fields, you very likely have a setting incorrect.

[violao]

Originally posted by mustardman
Go for 768x576...
and deinterlace only if you intend to produce progressive video for PC.

Otherwise capture at 720x576 interlaced. Remember, TV doesn't use square pixels, so DVD use 720x576 (5:4) to produce correct (4:3) aspect ratio. I can see no benefit from capturing at 768 and resizing to 720 afterwards.

[mustardman]

True. True.

TV's don't use pixels at all - they are analog devices. But you could stretch the definition of pixel to say that they have a vertical resolution of 576 "pixels". Even then, they have more than 576 lines in an active frame (576 is only the "active picture" part).

The horizontal "pixel" count really only equates to the quality of the capture. Depending on the quality of your capture device, 768 is better quality than 720, and used to be pretty common before DVD and DV came along. Only reason I suggest it is because it is more commonly used for capture from an analog source using MJPG. Of course if DV is your codec, then you'd be stupid to use anything other than 720, unless you like wasting your time.

No, I agree with violao that 720 would be sufficent - especially considering that you talked about 352x288 in your first post. It will all depend on what your capure card will actually allow you to set.

(My old DC30 would not allow 720 horizontal - only 768,384 and other wierd sizes with cropping, like 704 !)

[Wilbert]

Depending on the quality of your capture device, 768 is better quality than 720
False. There isn't more detail in it (only more noise).