High-end video capture cards

[pipefan413]

The most important thing is being able to capture YUY2 so that a clean IVTC can be done which will help immensely with frame syncing. If a video reference is all you need then it doesn't matter if the colour/contrast are off.

Obviously if capturing bit-perfect you'll need to run a parallel audio capture so you need a quick enough system to be able to capture without dropping frames/audio, you'll probably end up capturing the analogue audio alongside the digital which helps to line things up when audio syncing

Yep, that's the plan. I have no idea about being able to cap YUY2 though, that's the sort of thing I'm wondering about what I use to capture. Do you know if these crappy £6 USB EasyCap things would manage that? At a glance, it seems like maybe they can: 🔍https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/eas...#post-2440

But yeah, I think I want to basically record the following in parallel:

1. Video over whatever crappy capture device I can manage (analogue) for basically no reason other than to sync the audio by providing a structural frame to hang it on
2. Digital audio from TOSLINK, probably via Reaper
3. Analogue audio from RCA, possibly via VirtualDub or similar (alongside the video)

I'm also planning on running every Dolby Stereo / Ultra Stereo track twice: once to capture the bit perfect track, then once more to capture it through a hardware Dolby decoder (I actually have two I want to try, one that's a consumer Pro Logic one before PLII landed, and another that's the actual studio Dolby SDU4 with XLR in/out). I might actually be best to just run the bit perfect caps back through after recording them, so that the RCA sound card output is sent to the RCA/XLR Lt & Rt inputs of the hardware decoder being used at the time and then the RCA out of the Yamaha is sent back to the RCA in of the sound card's daughter card (which is all shielded and gold plated etc.) or the XLR out of the Dolby is sent along XLR-TRS balanced cables to an audio interface, depending on which hardware I'm using to de-matrix. I reckon I might do this part at the highest practical sample rate depending on the capture device (e.g. 192 Hz) since it's in the analogue realm at this point. Then I'll align the 4-channel recordings to the original captures (and archive those as 24-bit 4.0 FLAC) and do the resync at 32-bit floating point 192 kHz before finally resampling to 48 kHz and applying auto-blanking dither to minimise degradation and noise. I'll then encode the final synced files to DTS-HD MA 4.0 and test. If I'm unconvinced that the encode is playing back correctly, I may try other things like 5.0 (duplicating the surround channel and dropping its gain accordingly) and maybe even something bizarre like 7.0 to see what my 7.1 AVR does with that (so that all the surrounds contain the same channel but with the gain dropped; theoretically shouldn't sound different from the 4.0 but depends what the AVR makes of it).

I was able to capture lossless video (HuffYUV) and bit-perfect lossless audio (WAV) using a Core 2 Duo 6300 dual core 1.86GHz made in 2007, so I guess any half decent PC should be able to capture at the same quality; still, a PCI or PCIe card is highly reccomended, and there are really cheap ones around... but some homeworks are needed to find the right one!

And yeah, I'm running a high end AMD CPU on an ASUS ROG STRIX X470-F, which is a pretty capable setup, but it's already got quite a lot running on the PCIe lanes. On top of a big chunky butt dedicated GPU (which isn't quite top of the line but ain't no slouch either), I'm also running a 2 TB nVME SSD and am about to add a ZXR sound card as well, which takes up a fair bit of space. So I dunno how viable / wise it would be to cram something else into the limited PCIe area of the board.

If I can cap video with audio over an atrocious USB capture thingy that looks really bad but can still be accurately IVTCd, I'll be happy enough for now. It would perhaps be useful to do an actually good cap of the video at some point for preservation purposes but I'm not overly concerned about it just yet because I'm already spending more than I can reasonably afford to get the recording hardware and LD player (not to mention the actual LDs themselves). That said, if a USB capture device is going to screw up the IVTC or whatever, then it isn't worth the money saved, so maybe I'd be better with something else (BlackMagic Design Intensity Pro or similar)?

I'm excited! Need to secure an LD player now, have put in an offer but seller hasn't responded yet... also waiting to confirm payment for 2 very exciting LDs that were the whole reason I finally took the plunge and decided I'm going to give this capturing malarky a bash.