Hi everybody i'm new here, and i'm having problems :(
i have a Pinnacle DC10Plus here in my pc now, which a friend of mine lent me because on his PC (p3 550 256mb) it captured choppy videos, although it's quality was OK. since my system is faster i tried it on mine, and i get perfectly fluid videos, but with ANNOYING interference:



Click on picture for larger picture





this interference is also shown whenever i preview de input, from any program at all, and i've tried every setting posible... the weird thing is the card didn't show this lines back at my friend's pc.

my system goes like this

p4 2.6C@3.45 - 1 gig pc3200
2x120 SATA RAID0 - nVIDIA GF3
Pinnacle DC10 Plus

i THINK this might be due to a electrical problem so i thought of unmounting everything from the case and setting it up on a cardbox, but if anyone has ANY IDEAS about this please tell me before i make a whole MESS out of this

Thanks in advance, MatiasZ

***message edited to reduce image size, marc peters

definitely an electrical interference problem. computers are bad for that. what are each of your cases made of? steel/aluminium/perspex?

are you using the same cables?

Just to point out I got OK captures on my old PII / 350MHz machine with only 128Mb of RAM, but never at the highest quality, only ever with MPEG-1 compression and I frames only (could not calculated the intermediate P or B frames in real time). You could also capture raw AVI or HuffYUV compressed with a similar system but need a LOT of disk space !

As to your problem, looks like interference from electrical sources but also some interlacing artefacts. Maybe you could list the settings you used and the resolution plus let us know what format you are capturing to.

P.s. it would have been nice to crop out windows media player and just leave the image instead to not make the post quite so wide, but it's not important.

thanks for the answers!! first of all, sory about the image wide, i actually kind of wanted to put it that way so that you could see it was not a problem with the captured pc screen itself but only the video signal (since the rest of the screen is OK), but i agree it's still to big.
second of all, i've tested various ways of capturing. The image you're seeing is from a PAL capture. i've also tried using NTSC and it looks wrong too, with interference, and although is not the same/not as bad as in pal, it's still there. Regarding the input i've used different resolutions, with half/full frames, cropped, not cropped, and touched about EVERYTHING that you can touch in Pinnacle STUDIO 8.3, the way it looked and/or sized changed but the interference was always the same.

My case is made of steel... LOTS of steel.. is an Aopen HQ08 or something like that, it weights around 20kg empty, is made of 1.05mm steel... i don't have an osciloscope to try the signal of the case... oh and i'm running a Enermax 350W, which is supposed to be actually quiet good. Anything else before i carve up my pc?

oh and BTW sorry about spelling mistakes, english is not my first language

oh and i'm NOT using the same cables as my friend, his were MUCH better than mine... i have tried different (all regular) cables with the same result, and also used the same cable going from my dvd to my TV instead of the pc, and it looked perfectly...

Hi,

I just downloaded the PDF guide to the DC-10+. I think the thing that is going to make the most difference is to choose:

- Vertical Fields : One
- Horizontal Res : Half

Set the data rate about half of what the test shows your disk can do, set the video standard to PAL and your equipment to PAL if you can (PAL is better quality than NTSC).

Then, if there's still interference, post a screenshot of that particular capture setting so that we can compare.

Electrical interference is something else, but that shot you sent looks like interlacing going wrong. I believe your card captures directly to MJPEG so you can process it afterwards to de-interlace but I'm not fully sure what results would be like. I could be wrong about the interlacing issues but it's simple to eliminate that problem if we do the capture with settings above, then we can look at interference separately.

Cheers

Thanks for all the input!!! well, here is the ouput

This is what i did... unplugged everything except the essential from my pc, pluged a Composit PAL input signal, coming directly from my Digital Tv Decoder, into the DC10 Composite Input. So far so good... here are the settings i used in Studio 8.3:





this is how i used the output, but it doesn't matter really, since the input looked already wrong on the preview/capture page:



And finally here is the result: the same as before :(



Here is a zoomed and modified part of the screen where you can see the problem clearly:



i also touched everything touchable on those config screens i posted, and got the same ALWAYS...
soooo... what's next :cry: ?

Yep... from your new captures it's clear that the interlacing artifacts have gone away (well that's progress sort of, but given a good capture and deinterlacing you can get better resolution perhaps with using both fields) but that indeed the diagonal "banding" is still there. Funnily enough I didn't really see that diagonal banding too much before as I was distracted by the vertical fine stripes that are caused by capturing both vertical fields (in fact I'd say they're horizontal but well... maybe I'm wrong!), but it's very clear in the new captures.

This can only be interference in the analogue signal before it gets digitised, this is not a problem with the actual digital conversion process or anything that software options can fix.

I don't know enough about this, but I would suggest that maybe the cables aren't shielded properly, or the capture card isn't properly shielded from other PCI cards you have in the case. If you have a sound card right next to the capture card you can experiment by removing it. You could also try borrowing the cables your friend was using maybe they had good shielding.

Or, if you have a few PCI slots free, is to space the capture card as far away from everything else as possible, and experimenting with its position. But for sure the first thing to do is to use good quality shielded cables to get the signal to the card in the first place.

Hope this helps,

thanks fruey, you've been REALLY helpfull ok so i'm gonna see if i can get some better cables, try it out, and if it's still there i'm gonna rip the whole pc and leave just the essential stuff, and use it with out a case... and see what happens i'll post again whenever i get any news. thanks again for EVERYTHING, and see you around!!!!!

MatiasZ

OK let us know how you get on, it looks like if you get rid of that interference you'll be making some good quality captures!