Hi Jeff,

You have raise a super point and I think all PowerDirector editors should read your question and the answer provided.

I'd like to refer you first to the image I have attached. You'll need to look at Edit > Preferences > tab Capture

With MPEG@Best feature enabled [green tick] the capture setting maximises the capability of your CPU. The SQ default setting [3] is over written by MPEG@Best.

The SQ=3 gives a CPU useage of 10%

SQ=3 was defined for the P4 2.xGhz era.

Modern CPU's are capable of realtime TV/DV capture.

High Performance CPU should run at SQ=6 or 7 with MPEG@Best enabled.

I have been itching to answer this posting but needed to clarify a few points first.

Dafydd

Dafydd,

Thanks for the explanation. I video lots of high school volleyball were things are rather action packed. Ball speed during a kill can easily be 70+mph with massive acceleration which puts a demand on getting excellent quality videos.

When MPEG@BEST was introduced, in PD3 I believe, I had some initial issues with it apparently changing capture quality on the fly resulting in degraded video capture and then jerky and shadowed ball movements when PDR produced to DVD. I’ve had nothing but high end computers (currently AMD Athlon 6000+ dual core) but I’m usually running other processes in the background that may have contributed to the problems. Since then I had abandoned MPEG@BEST and always used my custom profile with CBR of 8700 and SQ of 7. I have no dropped frames during capture and this provided what appeared to be excellent quality videos and the 8700 bitrate does not need to be re-rendered when PDR writes to DVD saving production time (SVRT technology). It appeared the default capture VBR settings for DVD HQ at times I thought tended to show some volleyball shadowing/jerky during action events.

I was just reviewing my settings when I came across what appeared to be an anomaly in the PDR DVD HQ settings. Does PDR report anywhere what MPEG@BEST was able to achieve or do you simply look at properties of the captured mpg file and infer from bitrate/resolution?

This also brings up a second question. When “Create Disc” is used in PDR6, the preference options for disk quality can be set at DVD HQ. Does this honor the CBR of 8700 or does PDR6 revert to VBR of 8000avg, 8300max?

Thanks
Jeff