My goal is to transfer my old VHS and Hi-8mm home movies to DVD. I want to be able to split the video into chapters, cut out portions that I don't want to keep and add a few titles. That's really all I want to do. I am not interested in getting into movie production. I'm trying to keep this simple. I am starting with the VHS tapes simply because, at the moment, I don't have anything that will play the Hi-8 tapes. I own: Dell dimension 8300 Pentium 4 2.6 ghz 512 mb ram ATI All-in-wonder Radeon 9000 64mb video card 160 gb spare hard drive (a blank drive simply for storing videos) Roxio VideoWave bundled software that came with the video card Pinnacle Studio 9 I have managed to connect the VCR to the ATI card using the composite inputs. I have managed to capture video using the Roxio software and burn a DVD. However, the quality of the video leaves a great deal to be desired. I used DV Encoding for the capture. I tried the other encoding options and the only other one that was useful was the AVI uncompressed but I lost far too many frames. All other encoding either did not work due to incompatibilities or they looked awful. I got a copy of Pinnacle studio. I managed to capture video but something is very wrong. The video winds up looking like a split screen. I.e. there is a horizontal line across the screen splitting the window into 2 equal sections. Each section contains the video that I captured!!!! I have no idea what causes this nor how to fix it. I wanted to try the pinnacle software because it claims it can fix color problems and do stabilization. Since some of my tapes are very old, the color correction will probably be very important. However, I can't even capture the video correctly. So I'm open to suggestions. I would prefer not to buy more hardware. I am willing to purchase software if I'm convinced it'll really help. I have read about a zillion posts on this site and the more I read the more confused I get. I am very computer literate but am finding myself to be "video editing challenged" (i.e. I'm baffled). Thanks in advance.
For everything you ever wanted to know about capturing with an ATI card, look here: www.digitalfaq.com
oh my! that's one sweet site! I can see it's going to take me a while to wade my way through it. Thanks for the link! ...I wonder if it'll answer the question as to why my video ended up split screen.....
