better (not best) Hi8 capture.
 

got one o them sony hi8 cams. been using my all in wonder 8500dv to capture (as stated in another thread) but i always find the image lacking in that my software/hardware isn't capable of doing deinterlacing while capturing. are there any capture cards that capture non-interlaced videos from hi8 cams? are there affordable ones? affordable=$50-100.

if i can get near 'dv' quality as a computer file i'd be a happy camper. i don't have a dv cam and therefore can't transfer to dv then capture dv file onto PC. any ideas? thanks.

Up until 18 months ago, all my video was Hi-8. I captured it with no problems using a Canopus DVRex which does not de-interlace. The captured video which is immediately converted to DV by the board looks very good. A bit richer color than DV but not as high a resolution and of course, the normal Hi-8 tape glitches that DV just doesn't have.

That Hi-8 footage twice got on national television and although I delivered a DVCam tape to the producers, the source was Hi-8.

What do you want to do with the footage that makes de-interlacing necessary?

well when i view my captures (.avi or mpg2) whenever cam pans you see jagged edges REAL bad. i guess i need to 'fine tune' my analog capture but still... i thought there were better solutions. if what you say is true then i guess i'll just have to keep what i have and try to solve my probs. i haven't really output it back to anything it (no DVDRW).

Then I think you have a field order that needs to be corrected. Editing systems give precedence to one field or another. When you see the feathery leading edges or double images of objects in motion it is almost always a field order setting that is not correct.

in ATI's software suite there are 4 types of captures. AVI, MPEG1, MPEG2, and ATI's "VCR" (i think it's MPEG2 just renamed). under AVI you can select different types of codec. as you can see:

http://fongunlimited.com/temp/mpeg2.gif
http://fongunlimited.com/temp/avi.gif

MPEG2 offers deinterlacing. i have tried this option and the capture looks absolutely fantastic! under AVI i just use the default and it looks OKAY (no deinterlace). so where can i adjust the 'field order'? is it post processing?

anyway the problem generally arises when i import these into Premiere Pro. a lot of times simply playing back the AVI or MPEG2 would give me crashes. on AVI i captured about 4 minutes worth of footage (5GB) or so when i played it back in windows media player 9.x it works nice. when i playback under Prem Pro i lose the audio. when i export it i don't HAVE audio.

with MPEG2 when i import it, sometimes it plays ok sometimes it doesn't play and crashes. when i drag it from my library to my timeline to edit it crashes.

does anyone else beside me experience this? is this how is usually is for Premiere Pro? am i doin somn wrong? when i tried capturing via Prem Pro i get similar problems. should i get a true capture card? i know i know get DV... i might just borrow my friend's DV and try it out.

system: http://fongunlimited.com/htpc

I don't use Premiere Pro so I cannot help there.

5 minutes of DV should be just 1 gigabyte of data. 4 minutes for 5 gigs sounds like a lot less compression. Like you are capturing the video at a very low compression rate.

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