TV Tuner vs Editing card

[cameronem]

Hello,

The use I have is quite a simple one - the only functionality that I need is to capture from VHS tapes (PAL format) to edit out adverts / unwanted material. I am then going to be burning to DVD. The main stipulation I have is that the quality of image and audio needs to be top notch (as I will be playing back primarily on a large TV or projector, I realise quality won't improve!). I will not be doing effects of any sort just a very large number of in/out points. My intention is to capture an entire 3 hour VHS tape and then go through the whole thing marking in/out points and then leave the machine to render this.

I was thinking about a Matrox RT2500 or something along those lines but a friend has suggested all I need is a TV Tuner card.

My existing computer system is as follows:
Pentium IV 3.6GHz
2GB RAM
8 x 72Gb 15,000 RPM SCSI RAID array (for data & video)
36Gb 15,000RPM SCSI system drive
Basic (not on-board though) video card - will upgrade this

[Sergei_Esenin]

For your stated use there's little reason to get a Matrox hardware MJPEG capture card. Any good WDM compatible capture card (and decent soundcard) paired with the Picvideo MJPEG codec and VirtualVCR will capture your video with roughly the same results--better if you cap with huffyuv instead of MJPEG. The money you save on capture hardware can, if desired, probably be used to improve your VHS source player, since most people aren't using optimal sources with TBC.

BTW, VHS and other analog captures greatly benefit from Avisynth filtering. My current practice is to use an appropriate level of chroma noise reduction depending on the source and then process and resize with Didee's IIP script, which seems to improve the image quality of everything I've run through it.