lossless analog capture card - which one?

jm · Post by jm » Fri Nov 15, 2002 9:15 am

I'm looking to buy a capture card for my system:

Windows 2k
390 Ram
GeForce 2MX
40 Gig HD

Basically *all* I want a capture card for is to capture my very large collection of old & mouldy video cassettes for archival purposes. That's it. No DVD. No camcorder. No editing. Nothing but straight vcr capture.

So my question is this. What is the cheapest and most reliable card I can get hold of that will capture the video from my vcr with the best quality (preferably lossless)? I'm willing to pay up to $2000 on a card, although I'm assuming (and hoping) whatever card I get will cost something like a tenth of that.

Thanks!

Quu · Post by **Quu** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 11:58 am

hum.... best lossless capture card...

the problem with lossless capture is that not only is the card a bit pricy... but you need HUGE amounts of very fast hard drive space.... and I am not kidding.... LOTS of hard drive space

if you want a high quality capture just for archiving... try to find a Targa 1000 Pro (non pro is 640x480... pro is 720x480). the limitations are... you have to revert to Windows NT, and you have to use Premiere 5.1... but if you want the highest quality capture with in reason that is the best way.... youc an pick up a used T1K cheap... then capture at 6 megabyte per second 4:2:2 MJPEG...

or try to find a DC1000 used.... it also has a 4:2:2 capture option. but like the T1K it is dis continued. the Dc1000 will work winth windows 2000 and Premiere 6.0

for lossless... the only lossless card i have experiance with is the ATI AIW rage 128... and the targa 3000 (targa 3000 is VERY expensive)

if you want an awesome capture and editing... then i would suggest a Canopus DVStorm2

jm · Post by jm » Fri Nov 15, 2002 1:10 pm

Thanks - I appreciate your help!

I've checked, and the ATI AIW Rage 128 Pro 32MB Sdram is available locally; while all the other cards you listed are not - so I'll probably go for that one. At $155 it isn't such a bad price.

Quu · Post by **Quu** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 1:54 pm

my advice it to get an external TBC

the Datavideo TBC-1000 I have had lots of experiance with... and is releable....

I have found it for $300 on the internet

the next best TBC i have found was over $3k

and consider how many casset tapes i get a year to test with... trust me when i say its good.

Sub0 · Post by **Sub0** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 2:00 pm

... must not be in US... anyway your gonna need the fastest 40 gig you can find to get lossless captures (any card can do it... cept cards that only do proprietary captures... meaning they capture in their own proprietary format like Matrox's only do MJPEG AFAIK and AFAIK ATI's only do... whatever ATI's do... think I heard DV500s only do DV

but if somebody else corrects me than most likely they are right ;-p.)

if you were in US I'd highly suggest the latest All in Wonder, the AIW 9700 pro. not because you can actually game on the thing but the AIW 9700 line uses an up to date video processing chip (ATI MC2 rather than the MC1) this gives you a bunch of extra features! Biggest, in your case, would be Hardware encoding since, with a GF2 and 40 gig I'm not supposing you have a fast processor and SW encoding (even when using a lossy codec like divx) takes alot of proc power.

An ATI may be out of the question anyway cus you deffinitely want lossless captures right? But Im not sure about that.

anyway the ATI MC1 does have a hardware/ software variant that does give you good captures at a smaller rez like 320 (or 360) by 240 (with at least a 500mhz chip) but larger captures 640 (or 720) by 480 you'd need a 1ghz+ and DDR Ram. coarse you can ignore this and do it yourself but it'd result in dropped frames, a stuttery pic, unless you have the right speed of coarse.

also you'll be HARD pressed to use An ATI Rage card on any game that costs more than $10... it may also be a bit hard to find drivers for it as it's old and ATI wouldn't shake a flying $#!t towards it, try www.rage3d.com if you go that route. Also you may think the MX is weak at games, the Rage has less Gfx features than the MX (TnL...) and some games don't even work! Coarse I get the fealing you don't game on this machine... but figured Id put it in just in case

instead I'd take that 2000 and ask a local shop to build the best VIDEO EDITING computer they can with it (not Best Buy! A local computer shop) if you can order online ask at http://forums.delphiforums.com/evilcon/start they'll make one but be sure to say it's for VIDEO EDITING... if you want warranty and tech support get a dell but be prepaired to pay through your... nose.

you can also give in to the lossy side a little, it won't hurt much, promise!! try to d/l an MJPEG codec they're not that lossy, it's what most ppl use anyway ;-p.

Quu · Post by **Quu** » Fri Nov 15, 2002 2:55 pm

if you use VirtualDub the ATI rage 128 card will capture losslessly... hell it will capture into HuyffYUV...

they do make a PCI version of the Rage 128 AIW

jm · Post by jm » Sat Nov 16, 2002 2:32 pm

Thanks for your help everyone.

I'm getting a lot of different opinions from a lot of different people both online and offline to get different cards and it's turning out to be much harder than I thought. While on the one hand my brother and his friends insist that all I need is a low-end card, I'm very against dropping the quality since much of the stuff I want to archive is irreplaceable.

Be that as it may.

Rather than opening up a new topic I thought I'd continue on with this one to another question that's involved here. I understand that there are various audio-video hard disks available that have a high sustained transfer rate and high capacity. Does anyone have a model number they recommend? Preferably it won't be too expensive because I can't stray above my $2000 budget (and prefer to remain far below it). I need about 40-100 GB capacity since I'll probably be compressing and burning to cd right away whatever I capture. I hope to capture entire videotapes and then chop them up - so I want about 4 hours of video if possible.

Oh, by the way, since someone asked already - my cpu (which I forgot to put down in the specs) is an AMD Duron 750 Mhz. My motherboard is an ak33.

Anyway, if anyone has specific model recommendations on hd or even hd controller I'd appreciate it. It's so difficult to track down models when I have no experience with this level of hardware and when I have so many conflicting ideas on where to go. People are either pointing too high for me or too low. Yes, on the one hand I want a quality solution and on the other hand as cheap a solution as possible.

Again, thanks to everyone.

klinky · Post by **klinky** » Sat Nov 16, 2002 8:56 pm

Just get a cheap card and a 7200RPM IDE drive. Make sure you capture on a separate partition and that it's either empty or defragged really well(empy would be best). Use huffYUV to capture. It's about 16MB/sec, that's for DVD res of 720x480@29.97fps. It may be a little less if you capture at 640x480.

If you want to use uncompressed video, you will need something like a 10K - 15K RPM SCSI, check www.storagereview.com for reviews and benchmarks on all sorts of drives.

I doubt you will see alot of difference between the quality of a cheaper card and a exspensive one. The exspensive ones usually use some sort of custom hardware codec that allows them to capture good quality at fast speeds, though it's not lossless. Your best bet is huffYUV or uncompressed.

~klinky

Sub0 · Post by **Sub0** » Sun Nov 17, 2002 6:29 pm

klinky wrote:Just get a cheap card and a 7200RPM IDE drive. Make sure you capture on a separate partition and that it's either empty or defragged really well(empy would be best). Use huffYUV to capture. It's about 16MB/sec, that's for DVD res of 720x480@29.97fps. It may be a little less if you capture at 640x480.

If you want to use uncompressed video, you will need something like a 10K - 15K RPM SCSI, check www.storagereview.com for reviews and benchmarks on all sorts of drives.

I doubt you will see alot of difference between the quality of a cheaper card and a exspensive one. The exspensive ones usually use some sort of custom hardware codec that allows them to capture good quality at fast speeds, though it's not lossless. Your best bet is huffYUV or uncompressed.

~klinky

(???the stoopid @ link confoosed me???)

but basically, yeah, 7200 rpm hard drive and anything over U100 will be fine... less you want to double your speed, use raid0 than you may need u133 or serial ata (with a controler card)... if you are happy with the performance of your current hd but don't like the size than remember you can just ADD a decent sized drive (add a identical one and a raid capable controler card and you can set them up for RAID! not suggested for the over sensitive though

cuz though it is 2x as fast and you can use all 40x however many you get gigabytes if one hd fails it messes up the whole thing). However if you do get a 'backup' (or use your backup as your primary... whatever) that is also good as video tends to work slightly better when on it's own defragmented hd ;-p not as good as RAID but 0 risk.

IMAC · Post by **IMAC** » Wed Feb 05, 2003 8:55 am

ADS Technology makes a 1394 Capture and usb setup with an Analog breakout box that runs pretty nicely.

1394/Firewire: Pyro A/V Link API-550 ~$250
http://www.adstech.com/products/API_550 ... id=API-550

USB: USB Instant DVD USBAV-700 ~$200
http://www.adstech.com/products/USB_Ins ... =USBAV-700