Very jerky when capturing and playing back.

[Ted.]

Hi all,

I am using an MSI TV@Anywhere Plus ( Philips Cap713x Video Capture) package in conjunction with Video Studio 9.0 SE to capture small movie clips from VHS tapes.

I get a regular hesitation when capturing and playing back on all formats (except AVI of course). It's as though the capture is stopping momentarily to compress the data captured. Is the captured data fed into a buffer before compression or is it done on the fly? Could the onboard graphics be the answer?

The software in the MSI package captures and compresses on the fly perfectly, but it doesn't do WMV which I like because of the smaller files.

Windows Movie Maker gives me excellent results, but of course it captures in AVI and then converts to WMV.

[Ron P.]

s the captured data fed into a buffer before compression or is it done on the fly?

It is fed into a buffer.

It is best to use the capture program that came with your capture device to capture your video, then insert that into your video editing program, which in your case is VS9 SE.

[Black Lab]

And to add to Ron's advice, you can then convert the files to WMV using VS.

[Ted.]

Thank you Ron and Jeff,

It's a shame I can't use VS for the initial WMV capture because the quality is so good. Can any adjustment be made to the input buffer?
I do find that the VS rendering of an AVI file to WMV is so painfully slow compared to Movie Maker.

My MSI device provides high quality capture, but unfortunately no WMV option is available. I downloaded and installed the DIVX codec package to produce smaller files, but using the MSI capture with it just freezes the system.

Back to Windows Movie Maker, I suppose.

[Black Lab]

Does your hardware come with its own capturing software, or must you use the VS? As Ron advised, it is best to use the software that is made for the hardware. Once it is captured you can then import it into VS for editing, although editing WMV files may be difficult because of the compression.

[Ken Berry]

First, you don't tell us what you intend to do with the edited video. If you intend to burn it to DVD, there is no point at any stage of capturing to .wmv format. But if you only wanted to watch it on your computer, then I could understand it.

Second, I thought you could capture direct to .wmv using Windows Movie Maker... but I could be wrong on that. If it in fact does, you could capture using WMM and open the captured files for editing in VS -- though depending on how much editing you wanted to do, you could just as easily edit in WMM as well.

Third, it is no surprise the Movie Maker is faster in processing wmv. WMV is a Microsoft format, and Movie Maker is a Microsoft program, specially designed to deal with .wmv/.asf format.

[Ted.]

Hi, Jeff and Ken,

Actually, I really only want these files to store and playback on my computer, therefore the small file size and lower resolution suits me fine.

WMM captures in AVI and then there is a choice of WMV profiles to render with. Most editing tasks can be done as well. WMM really does the job well, but VS is more sophisticated and has the full screen option when capturing. However, it's the finished product that counts, isn't it?

Many thanks for your helpful comments.
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[skier-hughes]

MM will capture direct to many types of wmv.
You can select it as you work through the options, from low quality small file size for sending to portable devices to high quality for pc.