I would like to ask if it is better to buy a M-filter for my Snazzi PCI capture card or buy a Canopus raptor card then encode the avi file to mpeg using Tsunami Mpegencoder.I wold like to know if which of these capturing method would give a quality vcd results

-- Dennis Ty (dat725@pinoymail.com), August 30, 2001

Answers

I use none of the hardware & software that you mention but to the best of my knowledge ... the M-filter card gives you the ability of making the video soft. (diffused to mask all the artifacts & blockness) and you directly get an mpg file which is VCD complaint. The Canopus card with software option will give you a better picture quality but it is very time-consuming and also very expirimental procudure. ....and finally if you are just going to make VCD's (and not SVCD or DVD) then you have very little control over quality... because the VCD bitrate will not exceed 1150 Kbps.

-- Chetan Umarje (elegance@giaspn01.vsnl.net.in), August 30, 2001.

The M-filter is useful for die-hard hardware MPEG encoding enthusiasts. But, at more than $500 worth you might have second thoughts. Either way, you're using TMPGenc; picture processing options it has, including noise reduction to minimize blockiness, etc. will do the job just as well as, if not better than M-filter. You seem to be a litle mixed up. Snazzi PCI card is a by now passe hardware direct-to-MPEG-1 capture card, but at normal 1150kb/s VCD- compliant capture rates results are so horribly blocky do not even consider it, with or without the M-filter. Some say to capture at 3000kb/s and re-encode later to 1150, but then you undermine the whole advantage of direct-to-MPEG capture. Canopus raptor is a FireWire capture card that relies on a s/w DV-codec, and the h/w DV- codec inside your camcorder, which is why it's necessary for your camcorder to always be attached, even when doing NLE. Although there are analogue video in/out on the raptor you can NOT use these to capture analogue video because they are only for video overlay on the NLE; capture and output is strictly FireWire.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), September 01, 2001.