Recommended codec / settings for AVI capture

[waterspout]

I've been experimenting for some time trying to find capture / codec settings that will retain fairly high quality whilst achieving some compression when capturing to .AVI, without interlace artifacts. (Capturing from analogue thru PCI card.)

There is a plethora of choices - Indeo, Sorensen, MS MPEG-4 v1, v2, v3, MS Video, etc etc - it's a bit of a minefield!

Avoiding discussing MPEG-4 for the time being, can someone recommend a more stable compressor that will work well on PAL, full resolution video that's almost indistinguishable from uncompressed material?

(Also, should I be using RGB24, RGB16, YUY2, etc?)

Is there a user-friendly web resource that I can consult?

TIA.

[Ron P.]

Hi waterspout,

You might try Videohelp, there's a wealth of info there:

http://www.videohelp.com

Regards

Ron P.

[DVDDoug]

The consensus is AVI/DV. This is the format used by most DV cameras, and it requires about 13GB of disk space per hour.

It might be tempting to use MPEG, because MPEG-2 is the DVD standard and it takes less disk space. However, there are a couple of issues:

MPEG is mathematically intensive. If the CPU can’t keep up with the real-time streaming video, you’ll get dropped frames or file corruption. (This is not an issue if your capture card has a hardware MPEG encoder.) Also, you can’t perform high-quality 2-pass encoding during real-time capture.

MPEG is lossy. If you do any editing that requires a decode / re-code cycle, the 2nd encode will further degrade the video quality. Re-coding to a different bitrate (compression ratio) or from MPEG-4 to MPEG-2 will also result in unnecessary quality loss. (AVI/DV is lossy too, but much less so.)

If you're making a DVD, you should encode to MPEG once, after any editing.

MPEGs are not meant to be edited. You may end-up with a corrupted file that causes Video Studio to crash, or you might end-up with DVDs that have the “lip-sync” problems that inspired my “signature” below.

[waterspout]

Vidoman

Thanks for that link - there's some useful stuff there.

[waterspout]

DVDDoug

I tried to capture as DV once but I found the resulting file rather disappointingly low resolution. I'll try it through vs9 and let you know how I get on.

[waterspout]

DVDDoug

I tried using the DV settings, but they produced a file 932 MB for 30" which for my current project is too big - don't have enough HD space.

Also, I'm still getting interlace artifacts with this setting.

I guess I'll either have to invest in more storage space or investigate other codecs. huffYUV might be the answer.

[jchunter]

Waterspout,
There is NO reason to hesitate to capture directly to DVD quality Mpeg2 because it is the format that you will have to use when you burn your DVD. Your files will be tiny, compared to DV compressed files.

It appears that your computer is up to the task (assuming the Athlon 3000 is about 3 GHz).

When you create your final video file, Video Studio will Smart-Render it, recompressing only the GOPs where you made cuts. The rest of the video files retain their original compression.

[GuyL]

I use the huffyuv codec for capturing analog sources that I want to edit. It has worked flawlessly for me but does require a large hard drive.