PVR-150 video capture problem

[JonPatch]

Folks, I bought a PVR-150 primarily for its SVideo capture capability to transfer Hi-8 tapes to my hard drive, then create DVDs using Premiere Elements.  But I got caught up in its PVR capabilities (that's working fine now) and only now tried to capture video.  This has come up:

- what is the highest quality recording format?  12Mb CBR MPEG2?  Is that as good as AVI (which I note it cannot do)?
- audio is apparently not getting captured or encoded properly.  In one case when played back in Premiere a 30-second piece of audio repeats throughout the entire clip 20 minute clip.  When played back in WinTV it's ok, but when read in WinProducer, only that 30 seconds of audio and video is playable.  On another clip no audio was captured.  On a third clip it worked ok.  Any idea what the problem might be?  Is this format something non-standard that capture programs can't read?
- I note that if I use another capture utility, it views the video through the SVideo port ok, but won't record it.  Further it cannot see the PVR-150 audio input.  So is WinTV the only utility that can capture SVideo and audio off the PVR-150?

EDIT: all three clips playback fine in PowerDVD

Jon

[notorius]

Hi there,

what is the highest quality recording format?  12Mb CBR MPEG2?

afaik yes

Is that as good as AVI (which I note it cannot do)?

yes its even better, dont ask why, but it will take a long of time to explain + it will be very technical, so belive me, it is.

- audio is apparently not getting captured or encoded properly.  In one case when played back in Premiere a 30-second piece of audio repeats throughout the entire clip 20 minute clip.  When played back in WinTV it's ok, but when read in WinProducer, only that 30 seconds of audio and video is playable.  On another clip no audio was captured.  On a third clip it worked ok.  Any idea what the problem might be?  Is this format something non-standard that capture programs can't read?

Working with Premiere also , never had this issues.

- I note that if I use another capture utility, it views the video through the SVideo port ok, but won't record it.  Further it cannot see the PVR-150 audio input.  So is WinTV the only utility that can capture SVideo and audio off the PVR-150?

Well im using the Gbpvr / WinTVCap-Gui combo to record my stuff, it needs a couple of minutes to figure out how it works, but then it works as a charm. Try to search this forum about those tools.

Since im playing online-games, which are very CPU-Critical, i've spent alot of time to find the 'right thing' for me.

The GBPVR/WinTVCap_Gui is imho the best possibility to do that + while recording i got a 2% CPU on a Athlon 2800+.

After i recorded the stuff, i'm editing the whole stuff with Premiere and it works like it should.

Hope it did help you.

cheers

notorius

[Falcon4]

I just figured I should interject that AVI is merely an encapsulation format - there is no such thing as "compress as good as AVI". AVI can be many things - AVI is DivX, AVI is DV, AVI is Indeo, AVI is uncompressed bitmap... it can be just about anything. Nothing, I repeat, absolutely NOTHING is better than uncompressed bitmap as far as quality is concerned - it's the original image in any format at any framerate. But it takes a massive amount of disk space - we're talking well beyond measuring in kilobits and maybe even megabits. Of course that depends on your resolution. I can tell you for sure there's no such thing as uncompressed high-definition, that's for sure.

Since MPEG-2 is one of the more popular compression formats, and that's what comes out of the PVR-150, you're pretty much stuck with what comes out and that shouldn't be a problem. MPEG-4 is DivX/XviD. MPEG-1 is the common ".mpg" format found online. Just fyi.

This is informational only - I don't know anything about your particular situation, but I hope it helps.

[SHS]

Falcon4 only AVI RAW is only one that uncompressed most of the other codec use some forum compressing which can be any where from 5% to as much 60% compressing and min diff type ture AVI codec and codec like DivX or not AVi in fact DivX is very close to MPEG4.

[karelj]

I use Dscaler to capture AVI/HuffyUV and even after converting to mpeg2 the quality is far better than 15000kbps capture in the 150's native mpeg2 format.
The files are huge, but that's why I installed 2 200gb hard drives - soon to be replaced by a 500gb and a 700gb.

[JonPatch]

Thanks for the responses!  I've finally got back to fiddling with this.  The issue does not seem to be the PVR capture, whether I do MPEG or DVD, if I play it back in PowerDVD or WMP10, it looks ok.  BUT even the preview looks like bad in Premiere Elements.   In fact it looks the same as what it burns to DVD.  If I select "DVD standard play" for the recording, the playback looks fine in PowerDVD, but horrendous in Premiere.  If I use CBR 12Mbit MPEG, then the quality shows a big drop from the original, but it's not as bad in Premiere.  I used WinProducer with an NVidia capture card before without such issues on my old machine: the end result was MUCH better.

Unfortunately that system no longer works on my old machine, and I don't have much time to fiddle with this, so I'll likely just settle for low quality for now, and acknowledge I'm paying a high price for using Hi-8.

Jon

P.S. maybe part of the issue is that on my old machine I the NVidia hardware capture was superior?

[The_Doman]

Did you already try to make a DVD without processing the recordings with Premiere?
Just record using the standard DVD quality profile from WINTV2000 and burn it straight to DVD with for example the trial version of TMPGEnc DVD Author

This should normally give excellent results...

Also see here for some extra recording profiles to use in WINTV2000:
Best settings for VHS to DVD

[JonPatch]

Darn, I've already recorded at 12Mbps and TMPGEnc is not clever enough to convert to the standard DVD bit rate.

Thx for the profiles!

Jon

[JonPatch]

Alrighty, thanks for the clue on formats.  A good reminder that sometimes the problem isn't one app or the other, but the interaction between the two.  I experimented and determined the following:

- if I used old video I captured with WinProducer and view and burn that onto a DVD using Premiere Elements the result is fine
- if I use 12Mbit data acquired with the PVR-150 and view and burn that in Premiere the result shows a significant loss of resolution and quality, when compared to playback in  PowerDVD or WMP10.
- if I use DVD normal-quality format (8Mbit) when recording using the PVR-150, the playback looks fine, but in Premiere the result is awful: highly pixellated, intermittent color blotches, dropped pixels: it's a mess as reported earlier.
- Note also that TV shows captured with the PVR-150 look great when played back over the TV.  When burned to DVD the frame rate looks about half normal and the quality is poor.  Interlacing during movement is evident.

So the bottom line is:
- anything I've acquired so far with the PVR-150 looks poor to awful when burned to DVD or previewd in Premiere, but plays back fine on the PC
- anything I acquired with WinProducer looks fine on playback AND when burning to DVD.

So it appears to be something in the writing or intrepretation of the file format.  I'd love to be able to go back to WinProducer as an option, but I don't believe it can acquire from the PVR-150.  I'd even be willing to go back to my old machine, but that machine was rebuilt and now WinProducer recognizes the WDM video capture port, but only shows black.

Ideas?

Jon

[The_Doman]

So it appears to be something in the writing or intrepretation of the file format.  I'd love to be able to go back to WinProducer as an option, but I don't believe it can acquire from the PVR-150.  I'd even be willing to go back to my old machine, but that machine was rebuilt and now WinProducer recognizes the WDM video capture port, but only shows black.

Ideas?

Did you try to burn your recordings straight to DVD with TMPGEnc DVD Author ????

[JonPatch]

Did you try to burn your recordings straight to DVD with TMPGEnc DVD Author ????

Yes, indeedy.  DVDs created with TMPGEnc look great.  Same input file that looked like poop in Premiere Elements.  There was an audio issue with that DVD though: the stereo audio out from my DVD player worked fine, but there was no audio on the digital audio out that feeds my sound system.  I've never heard, er, not heard, that issue before...

Here's a screenshot of just how bad it looks in Premiere (imagine this small image blown up to full screen).  This pixellation waxes and wanes.


Jon

[The_Doman]

There was an audio issue with that DVD though: the stereo audio out from my DVD player worked fine, but there was no audio on the digital audio out that feeds my sound system.  I've never heard, er, not heard, that issue before...

That is because the audio is recorded in MPG format instead of dolby AC3. (The PVR 150 only records audio in MPG format)
You probably need to setup your DVD player correctly to ouput/resample MPG audio over the digital output.

With the right addons/programs you can convert the audio part to dolby AC3 ofcourse.

[JonPatch]

That is because the audio is recorded in MPG format instead of dolby AC3. (The PVR 150 only records audio in MPG format)
You probably need to setup your DVD player correctly to ouput/resample MPG audio over the digital output.

With the right addons/programs you can convert the audio part to dolby AC3 ofcourse.

Yup, I consider this a non-issue, just hadn't run into it before.  Meantime it may be time to wander over to the Premiere forum to figure this out...

Jon

[JonPatch]

Alrighty, a few days of adventuring over the Adobe Premiere forums, and my preliminary conclusion is that the PVR-150 + Adobe Premiere is a non-functional combination.  Premiere cannot read the MPEG the PVR-150 creates without moderate to severe degradation.  One could argue this is Adobe's fault for not handling every MPEG format variant (despite what I would call misleading advertising that it inputs MPEG), and the program is designed for DV input.  MPEG seems like a dysfunctional afterthought for them.

I tried both DVD quality (8Mb/s) and 12Mb/s and the result is the same.  The video plays fine in video players but is subject to pixellation and other transient degradation in PrE2.  One recommended solution was to use streamclip to convert the MPEG to DV/AVI first, but streamclip seems to have its own problems, creating corrupt files on longer clips.  Further this adds another rather tedious step in the workflow.

The recommended solution is to buy the Pyro A/V-PrE2 bundle, which looks like a good solution if I hadn't already spent $ on the PVR-150 + PrE2.  As a bonus I've got the PVR capability, which was superfluous initially, but I've grown to like.

So unless someone can provide further info, I recommend the PVR-150 as a PVR/tuner , and would consider it's MPEG capture feature not to be useful.   In general, this newbie is learning, MPEG is a lousy capture format.

BTW with an AC3 encoder installed, PrE2 creates the correct audio output.

Jon

[potplant]

Hi JonPatch,

Like you I bought the PVR-150 for converting hi8 tapes and VHS to digital.  I used WinTv2000 to capture into 12 bit Mpeg ( I assumed that this will give me the best quality - HD space is not an issue).  The captured mpeg file was fine - very usable.  Then I used Premier Elements 2.0 to produce a DVD.  Playing the DVD on the computer was ok, but on the tv, the video was flickering a lot (although no degradation that you have found).  Searching through premier's help, I noticed that you can change the options on a particular clip.  So I tried this:  select the clip on the timeline, goto clip->video options->field option.  Select "Reverse Field Dominance" and "flicker removal".

The result was a vast difference from the first try.