Capture format settings
The options available here depend on the capture device you are using (from the Capture source tab). You will not see all the settings described below displayed at once.
Presets
The settings in the other areas on the Capture format panel depend on your choice in this Presets area. The available presets depend in turn on your capture hardware.
For a DV capture source, the main capture options are selected in the first of two dropdown lists. (The other list provides any applicable sub-options.) The choices are:
· DV: Full quality DV capture, which uses about 200 MB of disk space per minute of video. There are no sub-options with this setting. DV capture is recommended over MPEG if outputting your project to videotape is a possibility.
· MPEG: Capturing to MPEG takes less space than DV but more time – both when capturing and later, when you output your movie. The quality presets (High, Medium and Low) are available as sub-options, plus a Custom preset that lets you configure the video settings manually. The best preset to use is the lowest one that meets the requirements of all the devices on which your movie will be played. Use Low if you are outputting only for VCD; Medium if you need to accommodate S-VCD; and High if your movie will be output for DVD.
Other types of capture device provide a single list of quality options – generally Good, Better, Best and Custom.
Studio AV/DV Analog captures use fixed capture settings with no further options.
Video settings
The settings available in this area depend on both the capture device and the options selected for it in the Presets area. Only applicable settings are shown. The settings are editable only if you are using a Custom preset.
Options: This button gives you access to any setup options offered by the codec (compression/decompression software) you have chosen.
Compression: Use this dropdown list to select the codec you want to use.
Width, Height: These fields control the dimensions of the captured video.
Frame rate: The number of frames per second you wish to capture. The two numerical options represent full-speed and half-speed video respectively. The lower number (14.985 for NTSC, 12.50 for PAL or SECAM) saves disk space at the expense of smoothness.
Quality, Data rate: Some codecs present quality options in terms of a compression percentage (Quality), and others in terms of the required data transfer rate in KB/sec (Data rate).
MPEG type: Select one of the two flavors of MPEG encoding: MPEG1 or MPEG2. The former is almost universally supported on Windows computers; the latter gives better quality for a given compression ratio.
Resolution: This is a dropdown list giving the resolutions available with the capture options you have picked. Increasing both the width (the first figure) and the height by a factor of two increases the amount of data to be processed by a factor of four.
Fast encode: This option speeds up the encoding process with some reduction in quality when capturing to an MPEG file. You may want to evaluate the effect of this option in your production using a short test capture.
Audio settings
These audio capture settings are editable only if you are using a Custom preset.
Include audio: Clear this checkbox if you are not planning to use the captured audio in your production.
Options: This button gives you access to any setup options offered by the codec (compression/ decompression software) you have chosen.
Compression: This dropdown shows the codec that will be used to compress the incoming audio data.
Channels, Sample rate: These settings control audio quality. “CD quality” is 16-bit stereo, 44.1 kHz.
MPEG capture
This area is visible only when an MPEG preset for the capture format has been selected.
The three options on the dropdown list control whether MPEG encoding is performed during capture, or as a separate step when capture is complete.
· Use default encoding mode lets Studio decide which of the other two choices to use given the speed of your computer.
· Encode in real time means that capture and encoding occur in one step. This will produce good results only on a fast enough machine.
· Encode after capturing means that encoding will not be performed until the capture itself is complete. This takes longer but is more reliable if you have a slower CPU.
