Is 720X480 a good resolution for video capture?

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Snakebyt

[H]ard|Gawd
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how will it look burned to a dvd and played on a TV, or played on a computer at 1280X1024? Will i still got a good picture? maybe VHS quality on the TV?
thinking of getting a 9000 pro AIW card because the wife wants me to transfer all the home videos of the kids to DVD, and would be nice to capture a few TV shows and burn them to DVD...
 
Old VHS is something like 300 lines of resolution, TV is around 500. I think 520? At any rate, the encoding I've done from my DV which is 720x480 looks fine on the tube - whether from the DV cam or transferred to video tape. On the PC, it will get fuzzy the bigger you make the media player window - but on a 1024x768 screen, 720x480 is more than half the screen size, so you'll have no problems seeing it there.

BB
 
Isn't 520 horizontal lines PAL standard? It seems that 720x480 is standard NTSC.

According to PhotoShop, anyway.
 
Personally, for your VHS to DVD transfers, I'd buy a stand-alone DVD Recorder. This will make it real-time copying.
Capturing into the computer will allow you to do editing and titles, but it will take 2-8 times longer to make a DVD.
At my old job, we used both, a stand alone Panasonic DVD-R and a Computer based DVD-R authoring system that used the Matrox RT.X100 Editing card.

Here is an example of a 1 hour video that is to be put onto DVD with no editing or titles, basically a straight dump.
Using the Panasonic DVD-R, project is done in 1 hour.
Using the Computer it takes 1 hour to capture, 1 hour to process into a DVD compliant Mpeg-2 file, 10-15minutes to burn, total of 2 hours and 15 minutes. This is using the Matrox RT.X100 which does real-time DVD Mpeg-2 encoding using hardware on the card.
Using software based encoding can take anywhere from 2-7 hours depending on the speed of the processor.
 
Originally posted by Snakebyt
how will it look burned to a dvd and played on a TV, or played on a computer at 1280X1024? Will i still got a good picture? maybe VHS quality on the TV?
thinking of getting a 9000 pro AIW card because the wife wants me to transfer all the home videos of the kids to DVD, and would be nice to capture a few TV shows and burn them to DVD...
Click to expand...

Most equipment can't capture at resolutions anywhere near that anyway so it's most likely that you'll be capturing to your pc at a higher resolution that the source material. VCDs are 352x288 (PAL) and this gives higher quality than VHS, on normal TVs the quality will be better than VHS. 720x480 is near DVD resolution but don't expect to get anywhere near DVD quality, most TV signals are broadcast at much lower and most DVcams etc can't capture that high, so really you're just upping the resolution for no reason. Whichever way you do it, while the quality won't look great on your PC, it will look much better on a TV.
 
Originally posted by Snakebyt
how will it look burned to a dvd and played on a TV, or played on a computer at 1280X1024? Will i still got a good picture? maybe VHS quality on the TV?
thinking of getting a 9000 pro AIW card because the wife wants me to transfer all the home videos of the kids to DVD, and would be nice to capture a few TV shows and burn them to DVD...
Click to expand...

you should use CD-R's instead...I heard they're pretty cheap at walmart
 
Full NTSC is 720x480 at 29.9 frames per second. (i.e. drop frame) For brodcast, it is interlaced.

DVDs as a standard are 720x480 progressive. i believe it is encoded at 24 fps since that is what the film source it is pulled form is. THen the dvd player usually has 3:2 pulldown conversion in it to get it back to the NTSC spec of frames per second

If you ahve DVD authoring software, and you make a DVD for playback in a set top box, your software will make it conform to the specs.
 
Originally posted by Reilly756
you should use CD-R's instead...I heard they're pretty cheap at walmart
Click to expand...

Really?? I think ill have to go buy 2900 of them :)
 
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