How do you capture Heatran on diamond?

Diamond VC500 video capture - Settings for full screen TV screen display?

• I purchased a Diamond VC500 to capture video and convert old VHS and 8mm tapes to DVD's. The quality looks good for YouTube sized, computer viewed videos, but how do I make the videos larger so that they will look good on a TV screen? When I view my captures at 100%, they are only normal sized viewing panes on my computer (not even full screen on my computer). When I make a DVD, it seems to be magnifying the video and the quality suffers. I'm using the DVD capture selction in the EZGrabber software that came with the device. Thanks.

• Answer:

  The DVD format is an old format, designed for old analogue tv's. DVD resolution is quite low for newer tv's. Full HD is 1920x1080 pixels, whereas the DVD format is max. 720x576 pixels. In other words, you would want to capture your video at the highest possible resolution. For this to work, you must set your grabber software (EZGrabber) to manual settings, and specifying the resolution to 720x576 pixels for PAL (50hz) or 720 × 480 pixels for NTSC (60hz), for DVD quality. I would recommend you to capture with no compression, as this will often decrease image quality, as on-the-fly compression can be lossy. Often losless capturing is called DV format. The files can be quite large though, approx. 1GB per minute. Later you can use tools for converting capture-file to either computer screen or DVD. I would recommend ConvertXtoDVD for DVD authoring. There are many good programs for video-compression. The H.264 format is often the best compression method. More infor om programs and authoring at: http://www.videohelp.com/ Hope this points you in the right direction, it's quite a large subject.