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View Full Version : Can overclocking increase my video capture quality?


Connoisseur
04-26-2004, 02:15 AM
I have an HP desktop which, unfortunately, has an Intel Celeron 2.4 Ghz. Wish I had a Pentium 4 as I have on my laptop. Anyway, the quality of the video I capture from my digital camcorder is somewhat lacking on the Celeron desktop. I have more RAM on my desktop (768 MB) than on my laptop (512 MB). But my Pentium 4 laptop (2.4 Ghz) does much better quality capturing from my video camera. I'm thinking Celeron is the culprit! So would overclocking (assuming the inherent hardware risks of course) yield me some more quality video capture on the desktop? Or is speeding things up this way not going to have a direct effect on the capture quality? Just for reference, the quality breakdown I'm referring to is a general "waviness" to the video I've captured on my desktop... nothing extremely bad, but enough to be annoying and discourage use of the Celeron desktop over the Pentium laptop.

Thoughts anyone?

Regards,
Connoisseur

Suhit Gupta
04-26-2004, 02:38 AM
What are the different video cards on the two machines? Although that should not really make a difference unless your video card supports video capture. What are the Bus speed differences of your motherboards? And maybe it could be your hard drive speed difference?

Just remember that if you do overclock your machine, make sure the cooling is set up well. I have overclocked both the celeron boxes I have had in the past :), and they clock up fairly easily.

Suhit

Lee Yuan Sheng
04-26-2004, 07:14 AM
I'm not a big fan of overclocking, despite having some decent cooling here. Maybe it's my luck, but the system is distinctively less stable, despite using the same core, settings, etc as the other overclockers. Oh well.

Anyway I thought the quality isn't really the processor's fault? At most it'll affect the speed, but quality wise..

Jason Dunn
04-26-2004, 04:10 PM
The quality of your video capture in this instance has absolutely nothing to do with the CPU - trust me on that. :-) What you're describing sounds like an interfearance problem - either a cable problem, or some sort of distortion being introduced by something on your desktop computer. Perhaps a power supply with a bad grounding? The cable is too close to the power supply? It might even be a lower-level chipset problem with your motherboard. No easy solutions...

Crocuta
04-26-2004, 09:19 PM
Yeah, Jason's got to be on the right track. Capturing DV is just moving digital information from the camcorder to the hard drive. It doesn't change it in any way. The only thing that I can think of that could go wrong with the capture is for the system to drop frames if the hard drive can't keep up with the Firewire connection. If that happened, you wouldn't get wavy video, but jerky, stuttering video. So here are the things I'm thinking.

1. You are capturing through a Firewire port and not via the analog out into a video card? If you were capturing via analog, I can see how you could get the waviness, and you'd also be losing overall quality in general. Since you have a DV camcorder, you should definitely be capturing via Firewire.

2. Is it possible the waviness is just a playback artifact unrelated to the capture? Like if you had the power cord for your Dv camcorder draped over the monitor data cable, you might get some waviness, but that should be for everything and not just the video playback.

You may have already ruled out stuff like this, but these are the only things I can think of that should cause that wavy behavior. One thing I can say for sure it that it's not a CPU speed issue. Let us know if any of the things any of us have said seem to be on point; I'm sure we're all curious as to what's causing it.

Connoisseur
04-27-2004, 12:15 AM
Interesting points. Thanks everyone. I am not too certain what is up to be honest with you. I will try a different firewire port, check my connections, etc...

I'll let you know if anything works,
Regards,
Connoisseur

Gary Sheynkman
05-01-2004, 10:55 PM
Well at least it's not your camera since you can produce good results with the laptop.

Overclocking increases the clockspeed but a) usually not THAT much unless you have very fance cooling and b)if you dont have fancy cooling can screw up your system (pretty much fry it)

If you overclock be like these guys:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20031230/index.html

they got that sucker to 5.25GHz!!

Connoisseur
05-02-2004, 11:41 PM
Well, I tried going directly from outlet power on my camera for a more even power source (no battery), I switched to my firewire port on the back of my computer instead of the front panel port, and I disconnected my external DVD burner and turned it's power off (in case I was getting power interference there). Didn't help with the waviness. So I switched to my other DVD program, Arcsoft's Showbiz, instead of my usual Roxio DVD Builder. Showbiz captured much better. Strange.... Never had a problem with DVD Builder on my laptop. So I'm not sure why the difference with Showbiz here on my desktop. I'm going to go with this desktop combination for my latest DVD project and see how I feel after finishing. I'm still confused, though, what the deal is. And I've decided not to try my hand at overclocking. Maybe someday I'll try when I get a new computer and my current desktop becomes my experimental machine :-). By the way, any preference on capturing in AVI versus MPEG? Anyone?

Regards,
Connoisseur

Jason Dunn
05-02-2004, 11:47 PM
So I switched to my other DVD program, Arcsoft's Showbiz, instead of my usual Roxio DVD Builder. Showbiz captured much better.

Odd - might be a corrupt codec or something. Perhaps try a reinstall of Roxio's DVD Builder.

By the way, any preference on capturing in AVI versus MPEG? Anyone?

When you capture in MPEG, you're losing data, similar to saving a picture in JPEG format. AVI has no data loss, so asusming you have enough hard drive space, it's best to capture in AVI, do your edits, then output to MPEG or WMV at the end to save space.