Best Way to Make Smash Vids?

[MagnuM]

What is the best way to make smash vids? I'm always looking for the best quality video and the lowest file size. How I used to do this in the past with capture cards is record myself playing uncompressed in both video and audio, and then I'd load VirtualDub and compress the file down to size. Makes pretty good quality at a low size, and it worked wonders. However, today's capture cards, like my TV Wonder Elite with their hardware compression cause 1 or 2 second lag when you try to play on your computer, making it impossible to play. So it's probably easier to make vids with a video camera.

What I do is hook my Cube up to the VCR, which is tied to the TV, through Composite Video In. I then take the Sony video camera and hook it up to the VCR through Composite Video Out. Then I press record on the camera and play on the TV and it will be captured on the camcorder tape. Once I have the footage, I hook my camcorder up to my computer using an Sony ILink FireWire cable. Then I go into Windows Movie Maker to capture the footage. Now here's the tricky part for me, picking the video settings. I'm not particularily a fan of WMVs very much because it does not load in Virtual Dub, not making it very editable, and also it forces people to use Windows Media Player and some people don't like that. Unfortunately, that's all Windows Movie Maker is, except for one setting: Digital Device Format (DV-AVI). This captures the video and sound pretty much uncompressed at about 180MB/min. This is great and all, because it can then be loaded up into Virtual Dub, since it's an AVI file, and be edited, tweaked, and compressed down to a smaller size. There's only one problem: scanlines appear during motion, also called interlace lines. Here is an example:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v206/MagnuM396/ghey.jpg

Deinterlacing this with a Virtual Dub filter will get rid of the interlace, but as a result, the picture looks a bit blurry. Perhaps there is a better way to deinterlace the video that I am not aware of. The reason why I want my videos in AVI so bad is because the video is so customizable (can be cropped, trimmed, shortened, filters can be added, compression options, etc). WMV is pretty much what you see, what you get. And Windows Movie Maker give you little advanced options (eg. you can't select the bit rates or the resolutions, there are only preset modes).

Basically, what is the fastest and best way to make smash videos either using a capturing device or a camcorder?

[Fenrir]

What is the best way to make smash vids? I'm always looking for the best quality video and the lowest file size. How I used to do this in the past with capture cards is record myself playing uncompressed in both video and audio, and then I'd load VirtualDub and compress the file down to size. Makes pretty good quality at a low size, and it worked wonders. However, today's capture cards, like my TV Wonder Elite with their hardware compression cause 1 or 2 second lag when you try to play on your computer, making it impossible to play.

In that case, wouldn't recording your match onto a VCR or DVD and then playing back the footage into your capture card work?

[jjl]

I don't run Windows so I can't give you advice about specific software, but I've had pretty good results in my experience with this.

Some suggestions:
1) Rather than the VCR's output going to the camcorder, can you have it go to the capture card on your computer? This way, you can play smash on your TV (in real time), and the recording (which you mentioned is a few seconds too laggy) will be done on the computer in the background.

2) By looking at your example image, it seems that you are doing this already, but are you capturing at the highest resolution possible (640x480 is the native res)? Many programs default to 320x240.

3) What kind of deinterlacing filter are you using? I've been using a simple linear interpolating one and it works fine for me.

4) Other filters? My computer (which is pretty fast) can capture (as mjpeg) in realtime with a pretty big chain of filters. I'm using a linear interpolating deinterlacer, vertical and horizontal deblocking, and a deringing filter. The first thing that you might want to look into is a deringing filter, as it will sharpen the image a bit if the input is too blurry for you. Generally though it's only really useful on things like text, but maybe it'll help you a bit.

If you're not satisfied with the deinterlacer, try experimenting with other ones. I haven't noticed a huge difference (the various ones I tried include linear interpolators, cubic interpolators, median filters) and I'm pretty satisfied with the default ones.

Here's a sample image from one of my captures.
http://jjl.mit.edu/public/capture_hq.png

This image is from a video that was captured and encoded with DivX in real time. It's possible to get even higher quality by capturing the raw YUV video data, but this would be several gigs per minute of video (and it will eventually get encoded to something smaller later anyway).

[MagnuM]

Wow the image quality of that screenshot is fantastic! What are your filesizes usually like? Also, where are you getting this deinterlace filters from and which program are you using? For me, I just go into Virtual Dub, then go Video --> Filters --> Add then choose "deinterlace" and then choose the "Blend fields together (best)" option. Then when it's compressed, it will try it's best to fix the scanlines or interlace lines. But like I said, it does appear to be a bit on the blurry side.

Could you also go into detail what capture card you have and what programs you use?

[BACH]

If you take a screen capture and it's interlaced like that - Photoshop's de-interlace filter will also correct that issue.

[Zodiac]

If you have a best buy they sell capture cards for 50 dollars that connect either dvd or vcr to your computer and come with software. or if you have a dvd cam and a dvd drive you can just record from the dvd cam, its actually not to bad of qaulity, compared to dvd tapes anyway.