Video Capture on a Beige G3

[iamdigitalman]

Hi guys. With all the talk about archiving old VHS tapes, I decided to set up a machine dedicated to this task. I chose my beige G3 MT, because I have the personality card with the RCA jacks on it, from a G3 AIO. I installed Mac OS 9.2.2, and it works great. As a test, I set up my PS2 into it, and did some video capture of me playing a game for a few minutes. After it was done, I let it compress. It was over 10,000 frames. I thought all was well, but I was wrong.

The video was less than 6 minutes long, but it was 524mb, and the sound was messed up. It was slowed down or something, and made it sound odd.

I do have the compression turned to max, and at the time I had virtual memory on, which I turned off, and rebooted.

Can anyone help me tweak this?

thanks.

 

[Christopher]

Might have to do with your compression, what are you options for compressing? The more compression, the more processor power it will take to finish. But it might have to do with the high compression not being able to work right in the software.

 

[Unknown_K]

Built in video isn't synced to sound via TBC like dedicated boards have (or use external inputs) so sound tend to go out of sync with longer captures. You also might have issues with dropped frames if your HD cannot keep up with the capture, and/or you are trying to capture at too high a resolution. Are you doing 30 FPS or the correct 29.xx FPS?

 

[iamdigitalman]

I have compression set to highest, the only options are highest, normal, or none.

I did not see anything to set the FPS, where would that be in Apple Video Player?

Is there no way to prevent the sound from lagging on longer videos? I really want to get several older VHSes archived. I don't think I have any other equipment to do it, unless I go out and buy a combo VHS DVD player with a DVD recorder in it. I have one of those combos, but it only has a DVD player in it. My only option is the beige.

By the way, I have the max 768mb in it right now, and virtual memory turned off. I shall try it again with VM off, and turn down the compression to normal, and see if that makes any difference.

 

[Christopher]

Try normal and none for the heck of it. If you have quicktime pro on that machine, use no compression and have quicktime compress into a smaller tasty package.

 

[Bunsen]

If you have a spare PCI slot, there are loads of cheapish PCI OS 9 only capture cards floating round on evilbay. That would give you both better resolution and hopefully synchronised sound.

Here's one example.

 

[Unknown_K]

The higher end cards sync perfectly (Targa 2000 for example) as long as you use decent software. Try Premiere 5 on what you have before you go an get new hardware.

 

[iamdigitalman]

Right, I will try new software before I try new hardware. There is no point in putting in additional hardware in the beige. I might as well put it in the WGS 9650.