Saturday, February 21, 2004

Capture Resolutions

My recommendations for capture resolutions, at least, my current recommendations based on some trial and error and various readings over the last few weeks. This is assuming that you're going to be putting the resulting video out to DVD at either half-D1 or full D1 resolution. ("Half-D1" is 352x480 30fps NTSC or 352x576 25fps PAL, "Full-D1" is 720x480 30fps NTSC or 720x576 25fps PAL.)

For relatively clean audio off of VHS, that you're not going to have to heavily process (e.g. just applying a Temporal Smoother filter), try capturing at 352x480 (half D1). It will cut your processing time in half and you can get away with lower bitrates on the DVD (3000-6000kbps) which gives you a lot more capacity per DVD.

OTOH, if you're going to have to heavily process (using the Smart Smoother HQ filter) the video, you should probably go ahead and capture VHS at 720x480 or 704x480 (full D1) in order to give the filters more data to work with. Once you've applied your filters, you may wish to make your last processing step a down-conversion to 352x480 (half D1) to speed up MPEG2 encoding and allow for more capacity on the DVD.

Capturing digital video (e.g. a MiniDV camcorder), of course, should be done at 720x480.

posted by Wuphon's at 8:26 PM