Video Achieving

[Ernie]

Hi there,

I have been interested for sometime in achieving my home video of my family on to some media more reliable than tape. The fear is that the tape may get mangled in the VCR and in making copies of the original tape, quality is lost. I recently came across the Pinnacle systems Studio MP10 which seemed to offer a solution by creating a CD using MPEG-1 format. Pinnacle sent me a demo CD which only demos the Video editing software, not an example for final output. Since then a friend has pointed me towards the Matrox Marvel G400-TV which sounds very good. I have downloaded the MPEG file posted by Elie and it plays well through my Videologic DVDPlayer (this is based the Hollywood+ chip set). Only when the camera is panning or an object is moving do I see distortion around the moving edges. Is this problem to do with my set up or the MPEG translation software? My DVD Player has no problem showing DVD movie disks. Has anyone else seen this problem with this example? I am new to the video capturing game so am not sure what to expect.
My main aim is to achieve my videos, so the supply of video editing software is a bonus, which I would use for simply tidying up my videos.
My main concern is maintaining video quality, at least the same as the input from Compact VHS tape.
Is this the device for me???

[Grigory]

Yes, it is a problem with any video compression that uses so-called interframe compression: writes for most of frames only changes from the previous frame(s).
To reduce those distortions, you generally have to make movies with more bytes per second.
For DVD (mpeg2), the data rate is about 5.0 megabits per second. For video CD (mpeg1), the datarate is typically 1.2 megabits per second. So, you cannot expect same quality from video CD.

Possible solution is to make MPEg2 archives. Typically you can fit up to 20 minutes of video with better than VHS quality on one CD.

Your decoder can play mpeg2 files very well.

To start with, you can try Ligos demo encoder from http://www.ligos.com.

You can download free encoder at http://members.home.net/beyeler/bbmpeg.html

it is slow, but works better especially in camera panning scenes.

Good luck,

Grigory

[Ernie]

Thanks Grigory,

How is TV resolutions i.e VHS and so on compared with PC resolutions (pixels)?

[sweeper]

I have a related question. I got the feeling, that the video encoding, say like MPEG, is limitted by the present processor speed. I wonder if there is an encoder, which provides an ultimately deep compression and the smallest file, and in order to be played back, this file demands a huge pre-processing, not reachable presently in real time?
So, one would need to decompress the file first to a playable standart, and then play it back on PC.

[This message has been edited by sweeper (edited 20 October 1999).]

[rhsmith]

Ernie:

VHS is roughly 352x240
SVHS/HI8 is roughly 704x480

Using my Marvel as an example, when I download from tape (HI8) to HDD at 704x480, audio at 44KHz 16bit stereo, using MJPEG compression the datastream is around 3MB/s sustained with one hour of video requiring approximately 12GB of storage. (Good thing we have codecs!)

Richard

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BH6/300a@450/128MB
Maxtor 17.2GB/
GXP 10GB/Fireball KA on
FastTrack66/Marvel G200/
MX300