Need a push start.

[RhinoZ]

Gidday Folks,
Need some advice. But first a little (boring) history lesson.
I'am a new father with "outlaws" scattered everywhere. Pictures are easy to send, but I was getting a little tired of tape to tape editting and sending tapes by mail. So I bought a new Tbird 900Mhrz yadda yadda yadda with a Matrox Marvel400TV with win2000pro preinstalled. Now, I researched the card before buying everything (way back in March) using the matrox forum and this forum. So I went with this set up as it was what I wanted to do, and I thought I could wait for what everybody was waiting for... the new 2000 Video tools. Well I was disappointed and a little ticked as everyyone because of the promised VTs, and also because I held up (all this time) waiting for nothing. So I basically had this card doing nothing while waiting for the VTs because I really didn't think I would have the time to reformat, reinstall, redo, refix, etc to find to right driver setup.

Anyways now my question.

Now that the VTs are out for all winXXXX, which is best solution and best picture quality for using the Marvel to:
Cature my vhs tapes, do a little editting, copy back to a tape, then taking the editted tape and capture that tape and make VCD's from it for storing and mailing it to family.

1) stay with win2000 and use the final w2k VTs and capture using yuy ( from Ulead 5.0) and all the other tools to get to the final result

or

2) Dual boot with win98se and use PCVCR (mjpeg) to capture etc etc..


I have everything I need except where to start.

I have a tbird 900 on an ASUS A7V, 512Ram, a second IBM hard drive for the captured files and Ulead VS5.0

Thanks for your advice in advance as I'm a little behind in this stuff, and getting bugged all the time ( yes I wish I can tell them to get their butts over here and visit, but then it might get more expensive for me in the long run)

Thanks again.

[Brian Ellis]

RhinoZ

If I were you, I'd go for the Win98SE dual-boot option and use the G-400 Marvel how it was intended, with MJPEG. However, I suggest a modification to your procedure. Capture from VHS tape (you probably won't notice much difference between 704 wide and 352 wide, because your VHS tapes are not going to give you anything better), edit and archive the results on HDD or on CD-Rs in the MJPEG format which will be the best quality you can obtain, under the circumstances (you will not gain anything by going to a lossless or MPEG-2 format for archiving). You can make a VHS tape, if you wish, but don't use it for archiving, as you will lose on quality again. Make your VCD master by a direct MPEG conversion from the MJPEG archive and not from a tape.

FWIW

[RhinoZ]

Thanks Brian for the excellent start and great advice. I never thought to burn a CD with the MJPEG file. I can't wait to get started and I hope to be problem free.

Have a good one.