Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)
I've been converting analog video from my Sony Hi8 camcorder to DVD
video for about a year now using an AverMedia DVD EZMaker PCI card
(this is a version that's about a year old, and appears to use the NEC
7130 chip). I've always had a vague notion that people seem to be a
bit fatter on the DVD than in the original video, and I finally
decided to take some calbration video to see if it's just my
imagination or not.
I shot a minute of video of my entertainment center, since it provides
lots of nice vertical and horizontal lines. I then encoded the video
to MPEG-2 and created a DVD in the "normal" fashion (see below). I
played the video back on the camcorder on the TV, and put Post-It
notes on various horizontal and vertical lines. Then I played the
same footage on the DVD player (same TV) and compared the image to the
Post-It notes. What I found is that the Post-Its measuring vertical
positioning were perfectly aligned, but in the horizontal direction
the image was slightly shifted to the left and "wider" than the
original.
I've monkeyed with a bunch of variables, and none seems to make any
difference. Originally, I was capturing using VirtualVCR to a huffyuv
encoded AVI at 720x480 resolution, encoding using TMPGEnc to encode to
MPEG-2 specifying the 4:3 NTSC aspect ratio, and using Pinnacle Studio
8 to author it to DVD. I've tried every combination of capturing at
720x480 or 704x480 and encoding telling TMPGEnc to use a 4:3 NTSC or
4:3 NTSC 704x480 ratio, with no change in the output (this by itself
seems strange to me - you'd think that capturing at 720 and encoding
at 704 or vice versa would have SOME difference, but the resulting
video files are visually identical).
I've even gone back to the neoDVD standard software that came with the
capture card to do the capture/encoding/authoring, but the resulting
video has the same weird stretching effect.
I seem to have eliminated all the possible software culprits. Is my
capture card just wacky? Or is there some setting somewhere that I
haven't thought of trying yet?
I'd hate to have to go out and buy another capture card - it was
something of a pain selecting this one originally, and I ended up
buying something unexpected (I had read reviews of this card that said
it used the bt8x8 chip, but found after I purchased it that AverMedia
had switched to the NEC chip). I remember that the supposed USB
hardware MPEG-2 devices I tried had had an unacceptable level of
compression artifacts, even when used on a USB2 port which should have
allowed it to go to maximum quality - not sure if this has changed or
not in the last year.
I've been converting analog video from my Sony Hi8 camcorder to DVD
video for about a year now using an AverMedia DVD EZMaker PCI card
(this is a version that's about a year old, and appears to use the NEC
7130 chip). I've always had a vague notion that people seem to be a
bit fatter on the DVD than in the original video, and I finally
decided to take some calbration video to see if it's just my
imagination or not.
I shot a minute of video of my entertainment center, since it provides
lots of nice vertical and horizontal lines. I then encoded the video
to MPEG-2 and created a DVD in the "normal" fashion (see below). I
played the video back on the camcorder on the TV, and put Post-It
notes on various horizontal and vertical lines. Then I played the
same footage on the DVD player (same TV) and compared the image to the
Post-It notes. What I found is that the Post-Its measuring vertical
positioning were perfectly aligned, but in the horizontal direction
the image was slightly shifted to the left and "wider" than the
original.
I've monkeyed with a bunch of variables, and none seems to make any
difference. Originally, I was capturing using VirtualVCR to a huffyuv
encoded AVI at 720x480 resolution, encoding using TMPGEnc to encode to
MPEG-2 specifying the 4:3 NTSC aspect ratio, and using Pinnacle Studio
8 to author it to DVD. I've tried every combination of capturing at
720x480 or 704x480 and encoding telling TMPGEnc to use a 4:3 NTSC or
4:3 NTSC 704x480 ratio, with no change in the output (this by itself
seems strange to me - you'd think that capturing at 720 and encoding
at 704 or vice versa would have SOME difference, but the resulting
video files are visually identical).
I've even gone back to the neoDVD standard software that came with the
capture card to do the capture/encoding/authoring, but the resulting
video has the same weird stretching effect.
I seem to have eliminated all the possible software culprits. Is my
capture card just wacky? Or is there some setting somewhere that I
haven't thought of trying yet?
I'd hate to have to go out and buy another capture card - it was
something of a pain selecting this one originally, and I ended up
buying something unexpected (I had read reviews of this card that said
it used the bt8x8 chip, but found after I purchased it that AverMedia
had switched to the NEC chip). I remember that the supposed USB
hardware MPEG-2 devices I tried had had an unacceptable level of
compression artifacts, even when used on a USB2 port which should have
allowed it to go to maximum quality - not sure if this has changed or
not in the last year.
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