background: PIII 800MHz w/256K RAM TDK Indicapture analog to MPEG converter Arcsoft Showbiz (supplied with TDK box) I'm getting close to acceptable quality for my 8mm videos to DVD. Originally I couldn't capture at full D1 resolution but defragging the hard drives and updating my VIA 4 in 1 drivers solved that problem. (Half D1 wasn't an option since my software reencoded up to 780x480) I started playing with the showbiz filter settings and different bitrates and resolutions. By turning on the horizontal and vertical luma and a chroma filter I improved the quality considerably. But what are these filters and what are they doing? Showbiz documentation and website is terrible so I'm hoping someone can shed some light on what these filters do and what happens if set too high or too low. Yes I'm tired of making test DVDRs. Dang, I was going post a screen shot but not sure how to do it. So the settings for the Horizontal Chroma filter is on (4 MHz) or off. For the luma filters it's between 2 and 9 MHz. I know few people out there have the TDK Indicapture or the showbiz software so I'm hoping the filters are something general. Thanks. Love this forum! Steve O
YUV/YV12/UYU2 Colorspaces are Made up of Chromanance and Lumanance were RGB Video is Made up of the Colors Red, Green, Blue, So when you adjust these Values you are Basicly just adjusting the Color depth ... The Luminance represents Brightness and Darkness and the Chrominance represents the Color.... Are you adjusting these Values before you actually capture the video or are you captureing the Video and then Adjusting these values and then Letting ShowBiz re-encode the Video with the New Settings??? And you Can capture at Half D1 and just use something else to author the DVD, There are lots of Programs that you Can download that will author the Files to DVD without re-encodeing....
I can't tell when the filters are applied. I tried looking the cpu usage but either way it shoots up to 100%. Even if reencoding I don't mind since the results are so much sharper and the noise in dark scenes is reduced. And more importantly the audio seems to remain synced up. One thing I noticed with showbiz was that when capturing the audio in the displayed scene during capture appears to be off, but after the "producing" step it syncs up just fine. I did download the trial version of DVDlab to try authoring a half D1 video. Just haven't gotten around to it yet. I wasn't impressed with the capture quality at 352x480 but I can't remember right now if I had the filters on or not. Thanks for the explanation. This is quite a learning curve but fun (till windoze locks up anyway). Steve O
I have a tdk indicapture and also have questions about the settings. I find blockiness in the recorded video in fast moving sequences. Are there any codec settings such as GOP frames that would help. I cant up the bitrate beyond MBits but can up the peak bitrate. My guess is that inceasing the GOP might help as it would allow more compression. I dont have any info on the chroma or luma filters. Any advice from users would be appreciated.
A Smaller GOP will allow for better quality because space between I Frames is smaller, I use a 12 frame GOP..Also a Open GOP allows for better compression... YUV/YV12/YUY2/ect Colorspaces are Made up of Chroma and Luma (Chromanance and Luminance) were RGB Colorspace is is made up of the Colors Red,Green & Blue... Chromanance is the Color and Lumanance is the Brightness so when you are adjusting those settings you are basicly adjusting the color... The Mpeg2 format uses the YV12 Colorspace.... For your Mpeg2 Files to be DVD compliant you have to keep the Video bitrate below 9800kbs Max but at that bitrate you would only get an hour per DVD....
