Feedback on my first cap, please?

[Samurai99]

I have tried my new TV-card for a while, and this was the outcome :)

http://s5.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2UH6WT253TJIC3V6GF5RAHIG5Q

Is the quality good enough, if no - what should I improve?

Here are my settings in honestech (capping program):

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/643/tv17ef.jpg

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/4374/tv24io.jpg

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/2034/tv32kb.jpg

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/8779/tv42ck.jpg


And one other thing, the file I just uploaded hasn't been encoded in any way by me - isn't that necessary? I chose MPEG-4....

I'm thankful for help here, everyone ;)

[mic]

Personal opinions and all :)
What do you want to do with your captured video? If you want to save it as smaller file on drive or CD looks good to me, though you *might* want to up the brightness &/or gamma a slight amount if possible.

The hardest part IMO for an mp4 encoder is dim blue or sandstone background, especially adding something like smoke -- especially during motion scenes, these can often cause blocking.

If capturing this sort of material does cause problems, or if you want the best possible quality, capture full size at highest bit rate possible, & then re-encode that. This would give you the option of adding any filtering in V/Dub if you wanted, provides the encoder with more info to work with, and might use 2 passes to increase accuracy.

But that might be a bit of overkill ;) If you like what you've got, maybe up the gamma and keep it. :D

[Boulder]

Read the capture guide which you can find at the main page. It contains a lot of useful information.

I wouldn't use any MPEG4 codec for capturing, HuffYUV or some MJPEG codec would be much better. It's also good to learn some Avisynth for processing the videos when encoding to the final format.