Hi all!
My PDI Deulxe card, while great, is pretty old. Also, I have had a couple of issues with it within my set-up that I've never been able to solve over the years of my using it. (1. Cap area shifted off-center enough so that I lose a couple of scanlines of image area from the top. 2. Randomly picks between even-field-first or odd-field-first capping with start of every capture! Especially since I do averaging of multiple captures, this is a pain, wastes lots of time!)
So, is there a newer card for about or under $200 out there that can give me the benefits of the last seven years of advancements in technology, that will make it easy for me to "upgrade" my cap card without any sacrifices in the quality I've gotten used to with the PDI Deluxe (perhaps new cards can actually do a bit better)? My need is pretty simple, just straight 720x480 lossless/HuffYUV capping from VHS or S-VHS tapes (i.e, near maximum quality preservation on a budget, which I've been able to attain with my current set-up except for the hiccups noted above).
One modern card that has caught my eye (and I suppose would be overkill for VHS capping) is the Intensity Pro. It would seem to me that it should be able to blow the PDI Deluxe out of the water in every regard...but perhaps not? Anyone here use that card? Any other cards that might be a good choice for an upgrade from a PDI?
Thanks for taking time to read this :)
LightWave = fun times with gfx for me 😃
Moth3r said:...
2. I think I read on Doom9 somewhere that the Intensity Pro is designed primarily for HDMI capture, and the analogue capability is almost an "afterthought". Looking on their website I can't see any specs for what kind of comb filter is on the card. The X0 project used the PDI Deluxe, but this card is quite old now.
Possibly the ideal would be to use a video scaler to convert the composite signal into component outputs (look on ebay, scalers are not as important in the digital age), and get a basic card that can capture component...
From this thread.
It's becoming more difficult to find reliable information on analogue capture cards these days, possibly because (1) people don't capture from analogue sources as often, and (2) when they do, they tend to just use a standalone DVD recorder.
I'm still using the old BT878a card I used for my laserdisc transfers back in the day, so I'd be interested to hear what you find out.
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If you're capturing from S-VHS, presumably you're using a Y/C connection, in which case the comb filter won't be crucial? I've never done any captures from NTSC tape, but PAL S-VHS through Y/C has always given a nice clean capture without any fancy processing...
Mother,
I saw that thread last night, and others around the net. Most reviews and such I saw don't address the specifics I seek, as you've found as well; I saw the thread about minimal support you were talking about. I might just have to buy an Intensity Pro and see for myself how it works/compares. That was an older thread, and maybe they put some fixes in the newer cards to make them better in the analog capture department.
Jonno,
Yeah, I use y/c connection of course. I actually am just a little technically ignorant enough not to know if what you say is correct. Mother, do you know?
I must say I'm amazed that the reply to the topic isn't a simple, "Oh, almost any card that from these companies that can capture video now will be better than that old thing!" Think about a hard drive from seven or eight years ago, or a USB drive, or just about anything else you can throw into a computer from that long ago...
If only I could get my PDI to shift down a few lines, and especially always start capture from the same field, it would basically be fine enough to keep using forever (both of these problems have been asked about at Doom9, no response -- but maybe I'll try again soon).
Not that I can afford it in the slightest, but what's people's thoughts on this? I'm guessing it would do pretty well! :) http://www.google.com/search?q=%22matrox+mxO2%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sa=N
LightWave = fun times with gfx for me 😃
The problem with the current range of cards is that DV is usually considered good enough for SD capture - you want uncompressed, which is something else (and until recently quite uncommon on the more affordable hardware, so the Intensity Pro is quite a bargain if it will do the job for you).
I don't see that the MXO2 will give any particular advantages in your case - it does pretty much the same thing for SD analogue sources (Matrox themselves did a comparison: http://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/mxo2_mini/intensity_pro/ which suggests that the benefits are entirely in the HD arena).
The company that I work for is a dealer for both, but SD processes only get the most cursory testing here (and only ever in PAL). Shame you're (presumably) not in the UK, or else we could have organised a try-out - it sounds like the work you're doing is considerably more interesting than most of our existing clients!
WXM said:Jonno,
Yeah, I use y/c connection of course. I actually am just a little technically ignorant enough not to know if what you say is correct. Mother, do you know?
Yes, this is correct. A comb filter separates the luma (y) and chroma (c) parts of a composite video signal. So if you feed the card an already-separated y/c (s-video) signal then the comb filter stage is bypassed.
If only I could get my PDI to shift down a few lines, and especially always start capture from the same field, it would basically be fine enough to keep using forever (both of these problems have been asked about at Doom9, no response -- but maybe I'll try again soon).
Unfortunately, the Pixel Magic support forum is even deader than the Doom9 analogue capture forum...
Have you tried asking at videohelp.com?
Jonno said:The problem with the current range of cards is that DV is usually considered good enough for SD capture - you want uncompressed, which is something else (and until recently quite uncommon on the more affordable hardware, so the Intensity Pro is quite a bargain if it will do the job for you).
Not sure exactly what you're trying to say here. My old £20 card, bought in 2004, can capture uncompressed.
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WXM,
You can shift the picture up and down with BT8x8 Tweaker for VirtualDub: http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/capture/bt_tweaker.html
If you are using another program to capture, you can try running VirtualDub at the same time. When you start a capture, regardless of the the software in use, the border settings are reset to the default values. To apply your changes again, press the Reassert button in BT8x8 Tweaker.
Thanks for the reply, Jonno. I just would have thought that all restrictions/options would have opened up over the years (such as option for uncompressed) as the tech advanced, but I was wrong apparently. People were just satisfied with not-the-best results when it came to capping SD analog I guess (largely thanks to a lot of ill advice out there, which I'll go into toward the bottom of this post).
Jonno said:I'm just wanting to be able to confidently retire a number of VHS tapes I have from film work I did years back (transfers to VHS), to save space. Nothing really interesting I would say, especially as I'm just following what a number of people on the net came up with in regards to technique. (I'm actually not very savvy at all when it comes to knowing what makes up video signals and such!)
it sounds like the work you're doing is considerably more interesting than most of our existing clients!
Jonno said:Correct. I'm in the US, my gear NTSC of course.
Shame you're (presumably) not in the UK
LightWave = fun times with gfx for me 😃
Wow, more replies came in!
Wstrwald, I discovered 8x8 Tweaker awhile back, and was all jazzed, but I tried it for two days and I just couldn't get it to work right. I forget the exact problems, but I remember crashing or the changes just not taking effect in the captures themselves (and I always use VirtualDub as my capping software). But, yeah, resetting was happening, so I will try what you said and cross my fingers. Still, my bigger problem was much more the randomizing of what field it grabbed first, but if I could fix one problem of my two, that would be awesome. :)
Mother, I haven't tried videohelp, so I'll give that a try soon. :)
LightWave = fun times with gfx for me 😃
Moth3r said:Not sure exactly what you're trying to say here. My old £20 card, bought in 2004, can capture uncompressed.
Only that I didn't think there was such a thing as a cheap uncompressed analogue capture card, but I was obviously wrong :-)
£20? That's mad... I wouldn't expect to find one of those half-arsed USB capture boxes for that amount.
I was doing most of my own analogue transfers around 2004 - looks like I missed a trick! I used a DV Storm card, which was a great editing accelerator but could only capture DV - I've subsequently discovered how limited that format is (particularly if you're encoding again to MPEG-2). You live and learn...