Capture VS11 vs. X3

[sgraham]

New 8gig Dell XPS8100 running VX3 on Windows 7. The old station is Dell high end Precision 4Gig XP Pro VS11. My camera is a Canon XL H1. Both systems recognize the camera and I captured three hours of film I shot last Saturday on the XP Pro machine. I am doing the capture now on the new Windows 7 VX3 machine. I'm going to take a look and see if there is any difference between the size of the mpg2 downconverted capture files and also try and evalutae if there are any quality differences. Since I am getting old my eye is not always so sharp and the moniters are different on the two workstations. Does anyone know if there is a driver difference or any sort of factors that would influence and produce differences in the quality of the capture between the workstation and software setups described above?

[DVDDoug]

I'm going to take a look and see if there is any difference between the size of the mpg2 downconverted capture files and also try and evaluate if there are any quality differences.

Are you sure it's getting "downconverted"? Does it record to MPEG-2 internally?

Typically with a digital camera, it's not really "video capture", but just a data-transfer (and sometimes data "re-packaging" to a computer file-format with the proper file header, & file name, etc.).

[sgraham]

the output is an MPG2 UFF. The file is exactly the same size on both workstations and, at least to my eye, looks exactly alike. No dropped frames as far as I can tell on either but I have found that is more a function of the camera that is doing the output than the capture software.

[Ron P.]

Canon's XL HI records HDV using the MPEG-2 codec to DV tape. However unless you set your camcorder to record standard definition DV, it records 1080i, High-Definition. If you used the firewire port to transfer the video from the camcorder to your PC, it is not capturing, but just transferring. When you transferred. did you set the capture properties to that of a standard definition video?

[sgraham]

I shoot in 30p High Def setting and it is automatic downconvert to 1440 x 1080 (1440 is canon anomaly) so a 60 min record dumps out to about 11gig. I did not see any Capture properties on the VS side. I do output from the camera via firewire.

[Ken Berry]

Down-conversion is from high def to standard def. Your camera is HDV and all HDV is 1440x1080 with a pixel aspect of .133, unless you're acquiring with a JVC, which is 1280 x 720, square pixel. This has nothing to do with the down-conversion or a Canon quirk, it's what all HDV cameras send. The .133 pixel is then stretched to become 1920 on display. In other words, a 1440 anamorphic image yields a 1920 display.