editing video

Figment

Im looking for advice on a system for editing video.

I have a great machine at the moment that i have no problems with when doing 3d, and graphics however im not getting the quality of video editing id like.

I have a 550 p3, half a gig of sdram 133, about a year ago i got the ati radion with tv in and out and more reciently upgraded my main HDD to an 80 gig at 7200 spead.

Im able to capture quite good video through the card in mpg format. But its not brilliant.

Id like it to be brilliant.

Im not able to go to the highest capture setting on the card as i loose about 30% of my frames.
What can i do for about €500.

Also, as im capturing the video compressed in mpg. when i edit it and render it back out am i loosing much more quality (i know it depends on render settings), is it lossy compression?.


and sure while i have you here
the card wont go to the ideal resolution and frequency of my 19" rebadged sony trinitron. Any ideas? im currently running it at 1024*768 at 80hz. The card specs says it should go higher to what i need. If i do, it goes down to 60hz and wreckes my eyes.

Inspector Gadget

...your motherboard may be too old to make the most of the fast HDD you've bought. Maybe you should invest in a PCI-based ATA-100 or ATA-133 controller to get a bit more oomph?

Also, encoding your data as MPEG (1 or 2, by the way?, or is it MJPEG as some cards do?) will cause a certain degradation of the picture - this will be especially obvious for MPEG-1. See if you can capture an uncompressed AVI onto that big HDD of yours and then encode it yourself into MPEG or DivX format to tailor the compression (and therefore the output quality) to suit. I find DivX gives better results for the same file size, if you're planning to only play it back on a computer (MPEG1/2 files can be burned to VideoCD/Super VideoCD for playback in most DVD players)...

Just my 2c...
Gadget