How does someone get started in capping vintage Aussie stuff from a common VCR. What's the best brand(s) of capture card to get stuff from? What are the specs for a bare minimum system to cap stuff from?

eljanna wrote:

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What is the best way of getting video and audio in sync ? I have no problems when its a short capture.like a station id.but when I try to capture a move or hour long show the audio is always out of sync. I have no problems if i encode in mpeg 1,but anything else is a problem.

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Dropped frames are, I guess, a fact of life when capturing from analogue sources. Over a short timescale, you probably won't notice anything amiss, but capture something over a long period and the differences in audio and video would be noticeable.

Probably the best strategy would be to capture the movie in small, logical chapters. By having only a few dropped frames per chapter, the overall audio/video would only be very slightly, not markedly, out of sync.

There will likely to be, due to the sheer nature of analogue media, major dropouts on the tape - if you can avoid capturing these dropouts, i.e. it won't affect the continuity of the movie, then do not capture them.

eljanna wrote:

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thanks for that info Tom,I will give it a go and let you know how it turns out.

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tbozic wrote:

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Dropped frames are, I guess, a fact of life when capturing from analogue sources. Over a short timescale, you probably won't notice anything amiss, but capture something over a long period and the differences in audio and video would be noticeable.

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Having had a bit more experience with my analogue capture card, I would say that the best strategy to avoid dropped frames is to make sure you have plenty of RAM. You could go buy some more if you want, but the cheapest strategy would be to simply shut down all unnecessary programs and processes before capturing. The last thing you want to happen is for swap space on your hard-disk to be utilised - the poor thing's busy as it is trying to write the captured data (and encoding it) to disk.

Make sure that your capturing program also has the ability to display statistics while it's capturing (the program that I use while running Windows, Virtual VCR does this) - that way, you can easily pick out where all of the major instances of dropped frames occur.

If - after you've ensured you've got enough RAM (you probably could capture with as little as 128MB, but I would recommend at least 1GB - especially if you are capturing at a resolution of 720x576 pixels) and maybe you've given your disk a bit of a 'de-fragment' (should you be using a filesystem that's prone to fragmentation, such as FAT) - you're getting a severe number of frames being dropped within a short timeperiod (e.g. more than 13 frames within a second while capturing PAL video at 25 frames per second), my strategy would be to stop capturing the video as is, rewind the tape, then re-capture the affected part and record the audio separately as well. This way, you'll have a few options in attempting to resync the audio and video:

• Using a video-editing program, add a few freeze frames from the video, or;
• Using an audio-editing program, either lengthen (adding silence or prolonging a sound) or shorten the audio track.

I do video capturing and I started out with one of though $120 USB capture devices from Harvey Norman, but it was crap.

I had to upgrade my computer for study and I wanted to do video editing as well, so I bought

a Intel iMac and Final Cut express 3.5.

I use a Canopus Advc-300 to Capture the video and firewire into my mac and it is brilliant.

It can go from Video to Video, Computer to Video, Video to Computer and Computer to Computer.

It has RCA and S-Video ports and Firewire and few other plugs.

The video come out better then the original and the picture is stabilised and cleaned up, as it goes though the device.

I hope this will help someone, I just thought I would leave my input.