Fasttrak Video ed s/w

I have just bought the bundle with Video Deluxe, Movies on CD & DVD and the capture card (AV). On the face it seems OK, the capture card is an oldish Avermedia device with only composite and SVHS inputs. The software is like a simplified Premiere although I would say if all you want to do is capture VHS and burn onto video-cds then you only need the Movies on CD software as this contains the 'burning' element. It will support video-cds modes 1 and 2 mini DVDs and DVDs if you have a DVD burner. It creates scenes and chapter menus automatically and will support most input cards such as the pinnacle or ATI/Matrox cards. I think the AV edition will even detect a DV cam attached via Firewire but I am not certain of this. I prefer to use my existing ATI TV card as this gives even better results than when used with its own ATI capture software. When video cds are burned they play back on my Samsung DVD player although they are slow to 'lock on' and load the menu. The Video Deluxe is more adapted to capture, edit, overlay titles and add effects etc but then only allows saving out to disk in all the usual formats, mpeg, avi, real media, quicktime etc using any existing codecs already installed like DivX etc.
Hope this helps
Dave
 
Thanks for that, Dave. Sounds like a 6 or 7 out of 10 then. I already have a FireWire card for the DV cam but I have an old NTSC 8mm Sony with lots of memories on tape that I would like to transfer. The reported resolution was (up to) 720X576 but you feel the ATI capture card is better? Since 8mm gets at best 350 lines do you think the quality difference would be noticable? S-Video should be plenty for an 14 year old 8mm. Are the slow loading times an artifact of the s/w or do you think it is the Samsung? Sorry to be a pain.

Thanks again.
 
Hi
I bought this software to transfer a collection of VHS movies and Go Fishing programmes taped off Sky. I find the ATI card best as although used under its own drivers it is mediocre, when used in conjunction with the additional codecs loaded with the Movie software it performs better and captures agreater range of resolutions and quality settings. I have captured from VHS at 640x480 s-vhs quality and 320x240 vhs quality and burned them both to a video-cd2 format. When played on my Samsung DVD player they produce full screen images the higher resolution producing a picture equitqble to standard VHS with a cheap tape.
I am sure with a bit of experimenting with the settings I can improve on the video quality quite a bit. The downside is the size of the captured files and the real-time required to sit and wait for a tape to be read into my PC. Then of course you can delete the adverts and cut out the scenes not wanted and add some fades to blend the remaining bits together nicely before burning a CD from it. The CDs burn quite quickly and I think the problem I had in reading it on the Samsung is probably because I used a CR-RW and kept re-using it. The first attempt read OK it was the subsequent versions that got slower, my DVD rom on the PC had no such problems. I suppose you could call this software as 'easy to use amateur' not for professional use but all the same its not that bad.
 

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