Hi,

I was thinking of buying a sony digital camera ( dcr-pc4)and i´m wondering what kind of video capture card to use. Does anybody have the mentioned digital camera and was able to produce a vcd out of the movie?

-- nathan summers (zombini@libertysurf.se), January 24, 2001

Answers

Hi Nathan.

I Just bought a Hauppauge DV-Wizard firewire card. Came with 3 ports. Hooked it to my Canon MV-30i and tried on my 6.5 minute clip to test. I use AVI_IO to capture the movie through this Hauppauge card. (You can use the bundled Video Studio 4.0 if you want, but I like AVI-IO because it can capture to multiple AVI files seamlessly).

I then edit the AVI in Media Studio 6.0 , edit away parts that I don't want, adding video effect, subtitle / banners, adding sound track, and then output to another AVI file, using one of the good codec available at highest possible quality, downsizing to the right VCD frame size (352x288 for PAL)

Took about 25 min (4 times real time).

Then I finally encode the AVI to VCD MPEG using TMPEG standard template.

Burn to CD using Nero 5.0

Hope this help.

Rusman

-- Rusman E. Priyana (priyana@eudoramail.com), January 24, 2001.

To Russman, exactly what codec is it you encoded your final AVI to 352x288 before finally giving the lot to TMPGenc?? I know you wouldn't encode the timeline contents of VideoStudio directly to VCD MPEG because the built-in Ligos encoder produces MPEG quality way below that of TMPGenc. Is that the case?? To Nathan, whatever DV camcorder you want, note if it has complete DV and analog in/out complement. There are quite a few such out there, notably PAL, that have DV out but not in, and likewise (both PAL and NTSC) analog out but not in. I learned my lesson.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), January 25, 2001.

Hi Mehmet.

I happen to own a Broadway card, and I found that the I-frame AVI codec that it has is very good, sharp in colour and small in size (2GB=25min or more), but can't go higher than 352x288, and you need to have the broadway card installed to be able to use the codec. So that is the codec I am using. If MSP 6.0 can server frame, that would be perfect as I won't have to have the intermediate AVI anymore.

I guess the HuffYuv lossless free codec should be quite good? I haven't tried that. What I know is my broadway codec is much sharper than MJPEG codec from MATROX. If you don't have any other usable codec, I guess Indeo 5.x at 95% quality, quick compress enabled, and 1 key frame every 1 frame is good enough.

Anyone know the tricks to 1. capture from DV at size other than the default DV codec size? Any 3rd party DV codec that can do that? 2. serve frame from MSP 6.0 ?

Cheers,

Rusman

-- Rusman E. Priyana (priyana@eudoramail.com), January 25, 2001.

THanks guys! I´d appreciate more tips before I buy a digital camcorder.. :)

-- nathan summers (zombini@libertysurf.se), January 25, 2001.