Broadway Pro 4.0 with Adaptec

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I bought a Broadway Pro 4.0 and am using Adaptec to burn the VCD's but am not happy with the results. Someone please advise as I am talking with the Broadway people about returning it buying something else. When I watch a VCD on my Philips DVD 825 I am noticing some very obvious and annoying artifacts. The source vide is a professionally made VHS tape made of a band I used to manage in Dallas and was made for VH1. I'm sure it is not a noisy tape. It also freezes up for a few seconds at various places during playback. The reason I bought this DVD player is because I made my CD's first and went to Best Buy and Circuit City and tried it in every player. The only ones it worked in were a Pioneer that the display video wasn't working and the Philips.It would not work in any of the numerous Sony's or Panasonics. My system is a Gateway Pentium II, 300 mhz, 128 meg of ram with a Philips burner that was purchased through Gateway. What di I need to do to get better quality?

-- Al McCraw (amccraw@ix.netcom.com), January 26, 2000

Answers

Hi Al,

I have been using Broadway Pro for more than a year producing wedding and event VCDs.

There are 2 ways to capture video to mpeg. One way is to capture straight to mpeg real time, but the quality is bad.

The other way is to first capture as AVI then compress to mpeg. This way you get good quality mpegs, but takes a longer time to compress.

I have been using the second method and so far no complaints from my customers.

Adrian Lee http://www.VideoLane.com

-- Adrian Lee (adrian@videolane.com), January 27, 2000.


hi i'm using broadway pro i notice that direct mpeg capture have very obvious artifacts can it be prevented by using darim m-filter? how much does it cost?

-- ravi (raviuma@vpost.com.sg), March 14, 2000.

I don't have mpegator or the mifilter($500) but I found this on their web page.......The recent addition to our product line, M-Filter, will greatly improve the quality of video captured into both MPEG and AVI format. M-Filter improves weak and unstable video signal that usually comes from old VHS tapes using onboard Time Base Corrector (TBC) unit and further reduces noise by feeding video trough several sophisticated digital filters. Manual controls are available to reduce or eliminate color or spatial distortions of the image. Needless to say, that the video signal conditioned and purified this way will result in great looking MPEG clips after being captured by MPEGator.

-- Al McCraw (amccraw@ix.netcom.com), March 15, 2000.

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