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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. :)

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:

it sounds like the work you're doing is considerably more interesting than most of our existing clients!

Jonno said:

Shame you're (presumably) not in the UK

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

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 :)

Hi readers-of-this-post

Very recently I told a pal of mine about fan edits, and when he heard that there was a cut like ADM's of Pearl Harbor out there, he immediately went to Amazon and bought a 2 disc special edition set of the official thing so he could watch ADM's version (in the supportive-to-fan-edits manner requested by fanedits.org). He has the Amazon recepit to prove he made the purchase, will show it to anyone...

It seems this one is really hard to come by now in DVD/anamorphic, but: Does anyone have a DVD version of ADM's Pearl Harbor Strength and Honor who could share a copy with my pal? He would of course gladly pay the postage and blank media costs to anyone who could help him out. Again, he's really hoping for an anamophc DVD so as to get the big-screen(-TV) experience, rather than a reduced-file-size non-animorphic avi file the likes of which was apparently torrented awhile back. Thanks for listening! :)

-1, come on, WALL-E is fine for what it is; is better than fine compared to most of what is being produced now (based on what I've heard). Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't believe your biggest complaint is really lack of big technical advances. I believe your beef more lies with the idea that the best stuff out there just doesn't quite have the great magic of works from decades past. More than advances, don't you really just want your socks to be blown off from some great inspiration (even if not via a huge leap forward in technology), and much of what's out there just doesn't do that for you? Well, that's what I want anyway, more umph

-1 mentioned TRON as a film that he still holds in high regard. What?! That old thing, with CG that an N64 could practically blow out of the water?! Well, yes! :) There are some scenes in that movie that just "nail it," know what I mean? Namely the lightcycles and tanks scenes; scenes that you make clips of and watch over and over because they're just so damned cool! The filming angles, the motions of the cycles (and tanks), the editing... When Empire Strikes Back came out, the whole SDs/TIEs chase asteroid field scene :O It was like you were swirling around in your chair in the theater! One scene in a somewhat recent film that also did that for me was the "Gandolf rides to/into Minas Tirith" scene in ROTK. Very impressive stuff!

It seems that so much in the movies these days is in the realm of rehash/watered-down homages (or extreme but hollow shock value). So -1, I offer that something in the larger sense is lost and that picking on Pixar and WALL-E isn't exactly fair, although I can see the temptation as they are "at the top" of the animated CG field right now. I know that it is kind of the unwritten job of the one on top to blow us away, but unless they have implicitly stepped forward to make that claim...

To the others, surely you can see a frustration in some with what is supposedly the best that is out there. Great things in the past are ignored or blown-off (largely because they are not watched in a theater in 35mm film IMO). I'm not the best judge for WALL-E as I've seen only about 1/2 hour of it (two 15 min. segments at a movie theater), but those chunks didn't really draw me; I was not blown away and ready and eager to return to see the entire film. Does that make WALL-E a bad film to me? No. But for someone really wanting to be taken on a fantastic ride, does it offer the full goods? For me anyway, perhaps not (unless I caught two "unlucky" sections of the movie), but officially I have no opinion on the film as a whole. :)

Regarding the Pixar papers provided on the link, I kind of agree with -1 that for the most part they aren't anything too jaw dropping. A number of them are simply clever ways/shortcuts to reduce how long it takes to render scenes, which is nice to the production team but is literally a 0% difference on screen in the before and after sense. (and AOTC had pretty good CG cloth flow physics, before Ratatouille...)

There's my few cents. -1, I've obviously perhaps put some words in your mouth here so correct me if I'm off the mark. :)

Octorox said:

vbangle said:

Octorox said:

I personally think that ESB needs the most effects work of any of the OT. Lucas barely touched the effects (unlike ANH, where many shots were replaced with CG). And thus, ESB feels very dated (effects-wise I mean, the story is great). ANHR has a very pristine feeling because Ady chose to keep all of Lucas's CG as well as touch up and clean up the effects himself. Coming off of ANHR and watching ESB 2004, the movie looks like it was made 30 years earlier. If Ady wants his OT to feel consistent throughout, then he needs to do a LOT of work on ESB. The only elements that aren't noticeably badly composited are the walkers, and even they could use some stop motion blur or something. Everything needs it's color tweaked for consistency and I think Ady needs to really clean up all of the effects scenes. As long as we get at least as much work as was done on ANHR it should be great. This is a Revisited project, not a Preservation effort.

Adywan replaced GL's CG (or added to it) with his own CG. Adywan also dumped quite a bit of it into the bin.....thank you Adywan. :)

Actually, the only cg Ady added were new TIE fighters in the Yavin battle and the only CG he removed were some of the silly and intrusive creatures and robots in the sequence entering Mos Eisley...

lordjedi said:

Yada, yada, yada. What people don't realize is that Ron Paul is a true blue Libertarian. So if he did get elected, sure, he wouldn't take corporate money, but you can bet your ass that he also wouldn't put any regulations in that hamper business. If people think corporations are evil right now, wait until you live in a world with Ron Paul as President. He'd remove most taxes and remove all kinds of regulation. The free market would be truly free and I bet people would hate it. Conservatives would love it. In fact, if it weren't for his stance on Iraq, I'd support him.

Oh. Well, if I smoked weed then I might just be be doing as sean wookie is on voting day I think. Ugh. The one set of people I wish could be made president and vice next term is Bush and Cheney. I would sincerely like to see them in the white house for another four years to deal with the big fallout from what they've caused that's very likely on its way (to me it's mostly about the debt -- I am very anti-big-debt -- as Mister Mackey would say, "Debt is baaad, m'kay?":)). As it is now, the next president is going to have almost no choice but to raise taxes to do something about the debt, and that president, whoever they are, is going to get hammered for that, which I don't think is fair (while Bush and Cheney will be retiring on some pretty big nesteggs/gifts I imagine). I am actually surprised anyone wants to step into that post right now; I can't think of anything more thankless than to become US President in 2009. Anything they do to try to address most big problems will make them f**king hated and despised by huge numbers of Americans I imagine. What a terrible situation to put ones self into, isn't it?

Does anyone here have thoughts on this Ron Paul guy? One of my pals says he's going to vote for him, but I haven't looked into his views in detail yet myself.