Newbie Question.

[billyg03038]

First of all, I apologize, if the questions have already been asked. I did searches, and weren't finding the answers. Of course, searches usually require the right set of terms, and I'm not sure of the terms....

I just got a PowerColor Theater 550 Plus Tuner/Capture card. I also bought VideoStudio 10+. My system is a 2.8Ghz processor, w/ 1GB of memory, and a 160GB SATA hard drive, which I recently defragged.

I capture to AVI (720x480, MJPEG Codec), from a Directv input (S-Video). The picture is fine. However, I get a line at the top. From what research I have been able to do, I am guessing that it contains closed captioning and station information.

How can I capture to AVI, and not get that top line of data?

[Ken Berry]

If I have understood your post correctly, it is totally common to get a small coloured line (or hazy discoloration) at the top of captured analogue video. But it is very small and, once you have edited and produced your final file, the line is well outside the 'safe area'. The latter is the part of the video which will actually be shown on the TV screen. In other words, you will not see the line when you finally show your edited video back on the TV... I simply ignore it. But if you are really worried, you can use the Crop filter to reduce the area of video you are editing.

[billyg03038]

From what I've found, this is a line that close captioning/Station ID information. It should not be in the picture, as it is part of the "overscan". Unfortunately, it shows up on my capture, when I play it on my DVD player. I'll try the crop. I was just hoping that it could be done in the capture process...

[DVDDoug]

If your TV has a "picture size" adjustment on the back, you can tweak it a bit to increase the overscan. But, you may not want to do that, because you will loose a bit more of the image with all of your other program material.

This won't help with your problem, but...

I capture to AVI (720x480, MJPEG Codec)

If your capture card will allow it, try capturing to AVI/DV. The DV format is more standard, and you should have fewer problems, and maybe less video-degradation when you crop, or apply other video filters. (If I remember correctly, MJPEG uses about the same amount of compression as DV.) In either case, the format will be converted to MPEG-2 when you make a DVD.