Hi Inky, congratuations and my condolences to your father. He's about to begin his journey into the highly fun and frusterating world of video editing.

I recommend using the DV format for capturing files because it is supposedly a lossless process to edit video from DV to DV to DV, but I no longer believe this to be true because I'm finding that VideoFactory is dropping frames in my video when removing pieces from a DV file to create another DV file. I'm surprised that you've found the DV format to take up 1GB of space per minute, DV is huge but it shouldn't be quite THAT huge. DV runs about 12GB per hour, which breaks down to roughly 200MB per minute. Since the harddrive in his machine is 120GB, that should be more than enough space for creating a 2 hour video from various chunks of other video files. WMV is a great format when attempting to squeeze video into a small space, but you don't want to waste ANY video with a lossy compression format like WMV or MPEG2! Even though HI-8's resolution is lower than DV, you still want to use a format that's going to reproduce the source as accurately as possible.

It makes sense in the doesn't-make-sense world of PC multimedia for the WMV format to be an invalid source file. Microsoft created "DirectShow" which is a way to playback media in a consistent and standard way on a PC, then Microsoft creates the WMV and WMA formats which immediately break those standards. All other video and audio files use a software component called a "File Asynch Reader" to begin the process of reading the file from your harddrive and presenting them on the screen. Microsoft, as usual, had to throw in a monkey wrench and decided that those 2 Microsoft-created formats must use a different component to begin this process. So it's entirely possible that the SonicFoundry people didn't know or didn't want to waste development time writing around this *gotcha*

You mention the specs of your father's PC which are pretty good, but you fail to mention if he has any blood pressure medication or tranquilizers at his disposal because he's going to need them. Video Editing on a PC is one of the most frusterating experiences I've ever had to deal with. Expect every process to fail at least once for no reason and basically realize that the more time consuming the step in the process the more likely it is to fail. I AM NOT KIDDING. No matter what video editing tool I've used (VF2.0, Premiere, Showbiz, Movie Maker etc) you must plan for every step in the process to fail otherwise you will go mad when it does. I got so mad at Arcsoft Showbiz once that I slammed my monitor back into the drywall wall and left a huge dent in the wall. Even if you think it's succeeded, it still probably failed! For example, I just finished weeks of work on a wedding video only to discover the dropped frames in certain parts of the video when I watched the finished project. It never occurred to me that the software would be clever enough to find such a difficult way to screwup. The original assets were fine, it was only after I spent many hours editing it that the process got screwed up. So far VideoFactory 2.0 has clearly had the best video editor UI of any video editing application I've used. It's easy, has multiple tracks, has instant preview, and the best tutorials I've seen in any app. However, I find that it fails far too often when creating my final DV output files, my current problem is the *gotcha* of dropping frames from my video without any reason. The worst app was Premiere, what a terrible UI and the help was utterly useless!

And you didn't mention what the purpose of this editing is. Obviously, you'll want to move the video off the PC when complete and since you're working with Hi-8 can I assume that you are not backing up the finished DV files to tape? I expect that you are probably planning to put your videos to DVD, and that leaves me with the icing on the cake of video editing problems: DVD discs are far too incompatible with settop players. I've created many DVD projects only to find that the people I send the discs to cannot play the disc. Tell him to keep his VCR warmed up, because unless you're going to send discs to people on the cutting edge of technology who've bought a big-name DVD player within the past 12 months, you'll probably hear a lot of people say "I can't play it, can you put it on VHS for me?"

Thank you BOTH for the advice (and the speedy response). Grisetti- I do reside in the United States. Just to clarify the terminology, when capturing to a "DV Format" I'm capturing my analog video (HI-8) and creating a file that can be played on my computer (.avi). I cannot figure out why I'm getting 1GB/minute size files when I do this. Believe it or not, I do have some experience with non-linear editing, but it was a long time ago and the technology was emerging (i.e 80MB of RAM was a big deal). I will encourage my father to output his final project to tape since there are compatabilty issues with DVD formats and the tape will be only distributed to family members. Still looking for any advice when capturing analog video. Thanks again for your help.

Actually, DV-AVI is a codec for AVI, believe it or not. The reason your files are so huge is because you're not using any compression codec at all. Look for a way to set your codec and set your AVI codec to DV-NTSC. As scs0 noted, this will produce a virtually lossless compressed AVI that is about 12 Gb per half hour -- leaving you plenty of room to edit on the massive hard drive of yours.

I've never dealt with analogue input/output (my camcorder is a DV8), so someone else is going to have to coach you on outputting back out to your Hi-8 cam when you're done.

But, if I can disagree with scs0's otherwise on-the-nose post, I think you'll find, particularly on your powerful new computer, that DV editing is surprisingly easy! You may find a challenge here and there but, for the most part, I think you and your dad are going to be thrilled with what you can produce with Screenblast/Video Factory.

Hi Grisetti,

I disagree! I find it a highly stressful activity! I'm in the middle of dealing with an obnoxious editing bug so that's why I came across somewhat sour on video editing software in general (Though Premiere deserves everything I said and thensome), but I admit that some of the reasons have absolutely nothing to do with the PC. Part of the reason video editing is so stressful is *because* it is so powerful. With VideoFactory I could even cut out individual frames if I wanted to, therefore it's so easy to get consumed with attempting to achieve perfection and any time a failure occurs (whether software related or user error) it will drive you crazy especially because video editing is a time consuming process because of the massive amounts of data involved.

I made a DVD a year ago from a project that I made with a camcorder and VCR back in my college days. As part of the disc I included all the stray "outtakes" that I could find on the cassette and it was a cassette that previously had been recorded with one of those 1970s Gilligan's Island made-for-TV movies. After I finished the DVD and watched it, I caught a spot where there was 2 maybe 3 frames of the Gilligan's Island movie on it! I was furious! Had I caught that before I burned the disc I would have edited out that tiny flaw because it was possible, and if I did I would have wasted a lot of DV to DVD MPEG2 compression time and probably managed to run out of disc space again. It's maddening the way striving for perfection on these discs is possible but will cause you to lose your mind in the process!

It is possible to change the capture settings in Movie Maker so that you can capture files in DV format. I also recommend that you have the newest version of Movie Maker which you can download for free from Microsoft. On my system, when I select the option "Capture from video device" along the leftside of Movie Maker, a wizard pops up that eventually asks what format I'd like to use for capture. They hide the selection somewhat because Microsoft wants to push their own WMV format, but if you select "Other Settings" when you get to the Video Settings page you can select DV-NTSC from the dropdown box.

But test a Movie Maker created file in Video Factory before doing anything too advanced. I created a DV file on another app (I can't remember if it was Movie Maker or Arcsoft Showbiz) and it played just fine everywhere but when I imported it into VideoFactory it put black bars around all 4 sides of the video and introduced a ripple effect in the content too. I guess there was some sort of incompatibility between the 2 apps that I never could pinpoint. The DV files that I created within VideoFactory itself didn't give me that problem at all.

Thanks for the advice...sorry to hear about the Gilligan's Island problem, but I hope you can chuckle about it now. :-) I did have the most recent version of Movie Maker installed on my computer, but decided to re-install it to make sure all the features are displayed and that I'm not using a "watered down" OEM version. Using the Wizard, I can go to "Configure Video Capture Device"/"Video Settings"/"Properties." In properties I have the following settings: Video: Standard NTSC_M; Frame Rate: 29.970; Color Space/Compression: UYVY; Output Size: 640x480; and the "Compression" area is grayed out (but contains I-Frame Interval, P-Frame Interval, and Quality). After leaving this part of the Wizard and going to the "Other Settings" area you mentioned in your post, I have 14 options for video ranging from Video for Pocket PC to High Quality Video, but nothing that says DV-AVI. I have also read about video capture properties in the help menu and Movie Maker states that all video captured by Movie Maker is saved into WMV format, but Movie Maker can import other files such as AVI. Perhaps you installed a DV-AVI codec on your system and Movie Maker is recognizing that feature?

Using the other software I mentioned earlier (Power Director Pro v2.5 by Cyberlink) I have access to 3 file formats (MPEG 1, MPEG 2, and AVI) and 11 different codecs, but nothing that says DV-AVI. Once I select a codec, I have various options for data rates ranging from 230kbs to 16,384 kbps. I have tested all the codecs using different data rates and upon playback the video is "choppy."

At this point I'm wondering if it is my video card. The system came with a 64MB nVidia GeForce4 MX440 with AGP8x. I've gone to the nVidia Web site and downloaded the most recent drivers, but still no change in performance. Has anyone had trouble with this card? This is sort of like owning a Ferrari with a flat tire. ;-) Thanks again for your help.

I did a little more research on analogue video capture, inky, and it appears that the best solution is NOT to save to AVI after all.

The DV-AVI is the format to choose when you're importing video from a DV camcorder, of course.

But from an ANALOGUE camcorder, you should use MPEG2 or whatever is recommended by your capture card. The conversion to AVI is artificial and will actually DEGRADE the quality of your capture.

Again, I'm not your expert on analogue capture. I've always been privileged to live in a DV world. So someone else is going to have to confirm this. But the rule of thumb seems to be to capture in the format that will make best use of your data, work in that format and output to that format.

Anybody else with analogue experience want to weigh in?

grisetti: I'm going to have to disagree slightly. The quality of the captured file is dependant mostly on frame size and bitrate. Most likely MPEG and DV will use the same frame size of 720x480. However, MPEG is probably captured at about 4 to 8Mbps whereas DV is 25Mbps for the video stream. There is room for a lot more information in DV than in MPEG and there is much less compression. Also, DV .avi is MUCH easier and faster to edit than MPEG.

Probably the only thing going for MPEG is that it is sampled 4:4:4 so you get full color resolution. DV is sampled 4:1:1 so the colors aren't quite as sharp. However, the lack of sharpness in DV usually is less of a distortion than the compression artifacts in MPEG.

You could get the best of both by capturing to uncompressed AVI and there won't be any loss of color resolution or compression artifacts at all. However, you'd also have files that are about 1.7GB/minute. Not the easiest thing to try to fit on your drive.

> I have access to 3 file formats (MPEG 1, MPEG 2, and AVI) and 11 different codecs, but nothing that says DV-AVI.

You might want to use a Motion JPEG (MJPEG) codec for analog capture. I have used the PICVideo MJPEG codec, which does a nice job. Morgan Multimedia also makes one as does MainConcept.

Also check out DVDRHelp.com’s capture section. This will give you lots of information on analog capture. There is no need to use the DV codec if your final output is not to DV tape. You will probably only be able to capture using a DV codec if you have hardware that supports it like the Canopus ADVC-100 or ADVC-50.

You can make excellent quality DVD’s from analog source captured as MJPEG by doing all your editing in MJPEG and just your final render to MPEG2. This is more than adequate for analog tape.

~jr

JR, Chienworks, & Grisetti

Thank you for all of your input. I've tried the PicVideo MJPEG Codec and it works very well. I'm currenlty experimenting with the settings to get an idea how much compression I can use before the quality starts to look poor. A quick question, once I've compressed the video using the MJPEG codec, the file is saved as .AVI. JR- you mentioned that I should do my editing in MJPEG...just to clarify, import the compressed video into Video Factory and do all my editing. Once my father's "masterpiece" is completed, render the video and save it to MPEG2 (if outputting to DVD), otherwise output back to VHS?

Thanks again for your help.

Nicholas,

Yes that’s correct. Do all of your editing in Motion JPEG just as you captured it. It stores full frames that are compressed with JPEG compression just like the still images in a digital camera. VF will recompress only the frames you change just like it does with DV. Don’t worry too much about the compression setting. All you are doing is trading off quality for disk space and your father seems to have more than enough disk space. You’re only going to delete the files when you’re done making your DVD or VHS tape anyway. I’d leave the quality at the default as long as you're not dropping frames on capture. Then render the final to MPEG2 for your DVD.

~jr

Thank you again for taking the time to help me. I've read several of your posts and you're an encyclopedia of helpful, sound advice. Thank you again.