recommend a s-video video capture card for Visual Studio 9

[petercli]

I want to convert my laser disc collection into dvd via s-video .
anyone recommend a video capture card that works well with VS9?
(Canopus 110 is way to expensive )

Any recommendations ?
Thanks,
Peter

[Ken Berry]

FWIW, I have a Leadtek Winfast DV2000 card which I find excellent for this sort of job. It will take S-video. The only down-side is that it will not capture in DV format, though it will in uncompressed AVI. Its direct mpeg-2 captures are excellent, though. And the capture software it comes with is, IMHO, a touch better than Video Studio for this sort of purpose. Be aware, though, that though capturing from an analogue source, it captures Lower Field First (instead of the more usual Upper Field First). Best of all, from your point of view, it is very much cheaper than the Canopus you mention, and you get a decent TV on your computer (from which you can capture direct, of course) plus, with some of the DV2000 cards, an FM radio as well!

[GuyL]

The ATI All-In-Wonder series of cards has served me well over the years. It can capture cable TV, composite and S-Video.

[GeorgeK]

Hi,

I have a WinFast Xp2000 TV tuner card which has S-Video and Composite video which I have found excellent. ... Except that.... my 2.0Ghz CPU is not fast enough to capture at 100% video quality. While I can tell little difference, I would prefer to capture at 100% quality (720x576 8000CBR video).

However a prefered method is to use my JVC DVL820 video camera to capture the S-Video to DV format, streamed via firewire from the camera to my computer as AVI type 1 DV files. In this way my footage is stored in a reasonably high quality format, not as good as raw AVI but at least Standard Definition quality (I hope).

The DViCO FusionHDTV tuner card as does the WinFast DV2000, uses the Conexant CX2388x 10 bit capture chip. While my card uses an 8 bit card.

The difference to my understanding is that from say black to white, the 10 bit card can take a range of 1024 samples, while an 8 bit card like mine can only take 256 samples, thus the 10 bit chip has about four times the variation in colour/contrast that my card can take. Now the video is only stored in RGB24, which means that each colour is only 8 bits, so I get to feel that the improvement is lost in encoding anyway. (Does anyone want to respond to this suggestion?).

Anyway, I would like to recommend to you that if you want to store you video for later use when we all have HDTV screens, then store to DV format if possible, otherwise if your only going to use standard TV Screens, then S-Video is fine.

One thing I will say, that I have found Audio/Video sync problems if I do not use UVS to do the Video capturing. Thus I always use Ulead to capture the video.

George.