I have been reading and reviewing posts here and elsewhere for about 6 months now and have also done some reading regarding mpeg formats as well as created VCD's with my Snazzi and ATI all in Wonder. First let me say both the Snazzi and ATI products seem to produce less than VHS quality VCD's(most of you know this I'm sure:) I read an interesting article today which a very mpeg educated individual commented on VCD creation as follows: "the best way to create a VCD is to capture at FULL screen resolution" for NTSC this is 480 horizontal lines. Most low budget (i.e. snazzi) cards capture at 352 x 240(emphasis on the 240) so they are only getting half of the picture. He goes on to say after capturing you then deinterlace the resultant file with Adobe Premiere or the like and then resize the video to 352 x 240(NTSC). You then encode to mpeg1 for VCD burning process. A lot of posts seem to be related to artifacts and poor image and it sure seems to me this is the cause. My question is "What capture cards are available at a decent price which can capture Full Screen??"

Much regards, John

-- John White (johnwhit@castles.com), September 24, 1999

Answers

Use Matrox Marvel G200. It can capture full-res (704x480), half-res (352x480), and quarter-res (352x240) to its own MJPEG-compressed AVI files. With a Ultra-33 HDD there are zero dropped frames at 29.97fps. Use half-res because it produces the best VCDs later after encoding with DVMPEG. Quarter-res is visibly poorer. Full-res is okay but the increase in quality in the final VCD pix is very marginal, and full- res gobbles up HDD space fast, anyway.

-- EMartinez (epmartinez@hotmail.com), September 25, 1999.

What do you mean by Ultra 33? Is that the brand of hard disk that you have, and why does that matter? After inputing the video with the Matrox card, what sort of software do you encode it with, and does this software come with the card?

-- Ken (kinterke@msu.edu), October 12, 1999.

Ultra 33 refers to an ATA 33 or udma 33 hard drive. basically it is a fast ide harddrive.Most current computers have harddrives that are "ultra 33". for software to convert avi to mpg there are at least 5 that come to mind, just read the faqs for this site.

-- tndumu (tndumu@msn.com), October 12, 1999.