Capturing VGA - Part 3

So I've been playing today ANNNND here are my results and something I've learned that I really should have thought about. 

In one of my previous posts, I said I had found an unpowered VGA splitter to be good enough for me. Well I take it back. Below is a screenshot (unedited) from OBS earlier using a VGA splitter and the new BlackMagic Design HDMI capture. 



As you can see - the image is extremely dark and if you click on it, you'll see that there is lots of noise in the image. For some reason, it has never crossed my mind as to why the image appears so dark. It's because I'm splitting the signal in half. DUH! Of course it's going to be dark. I also think the VGA splitter cable is responsible for the noise that's been added to the image. When plugged directly into the graphics card, the capture is noise free. Here's what it should look like. 


This is much better. (Ignore the colour depth change. The first screenshot was at 256 colours, this one is at 24 bit). It's much brighter and there's no noise in the image. The colours are a little off, but nothing I can't amend in my video editor.

I thought I'd run it through Photoshop and to an Auto-Colour to see what it did which looks more close to reality than the top two. 


So I need to get a powered VGA splitter. Just like with any part of this hobby - it's like opening a can of worms. I'm keeping my eye on this on eBay - let's hope no one else wants it!

 I'll post an update comparing the out put of the powered to the unpowered splitters once I've got one. Stay tuned! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Capturing VGA - Part 1

Image
A few years back I decided that I wanted to do some VGA capture from my old vintage computers so I could show it off in my YouTube videos. This lead me down a dark hole to try and get a working solution. I'd seen a couple of cheap VGA capture devices on eBay so bought a few to try. None of them were successful. I tried several different ways of doing it and I was pulling my hair out until  I stumbled upon a video by a fellow retro computer enthusiast called Victor Bart . He has done a fantastic video on the way he does it.  Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel I figured I'd give his solution a go. The only thing I changed was the capture card - mine is USB, not PCI-E. The secret sauce is the VGA scaler. Many older machines and games in DOS output at strange resolutions and switch between them frequently. Most of which these newer cheap VGA capture devices don't support these old resolutions. For example: the Windows 98 start up screen displays at something like 720x400....
Read more

Capturing VGA - Part 5

Image
I'm hoping that this will be the last post about how I capture VGA from my old retro machines as I think I now have a solution that works well. It also captures audio and injects that into the HDMI signal too.  So what's different from my last four posts? Well not much to be honest, other than I've changed the powered VGA splitter I'm using. For some reason, the two Startech splitters I bought, and worked fine, for some reason have introduced a flicker on my capture machine. So much so that the video is unusable. I've tried different cables and I even bought an identical one thinking my existing one was faulty. I went back to using the unpowered splitter cable, even though it produced a noticably darker image which I could fix in edting.  I'm on a discord server where a fellow YouTuber mentioned what they use, so off to eBay I went and I managed to purchase this: It's an Extron P/2 DA4xi 1:4 Four-Output VGA Video Distribution Amplifier DA - basically a power...
Read more

Stray for macOS released!

Image
I was desperate to play this game since it was announced and I was excited to hear it coming over to Apple Silicon. On launch day I downloaded it and I've so far been blown away by the graphics that my little M2 Mac mini is able to output. Here's a screenshot of some game play from my actual Mac mini.  The only thing I don't like about it is the Zurks! And if you know, you know ;)  I haven't finished the game yet but I just wanted to mention how gorgeous this game is and I'm super excited about it being available on the Mac. 
Read more