Batch Transfer & CD Burning

fcib wrote on 6/2/2002, 11:51 PM
Can someone explain the use for batch transfer? I got the program in a package and I want to know it basic value, as I will be ultimately be producing a 45 min training video. I want to understand all of my options.

Secondly, how many minutes of rendered video can you get on a CD-R/W? I can't find anything in the manual that provides even a rule of thumb

Thanks.

Comments

SonyDennis wrote on 6/3/2002, 12:29 PM
Batch Capture will let you re-capture a series of clips that were used in a project, so that you can keep them on the original DV tape instead of your hard disk when you're not working on that project.

A CD-R/RW disc holds 650 to 800 megabytes of data, and takes 74 to 80 minutes to play at 1x read rate. The only format and template that exactly matches this is MPEG-1 VCD, because the VCD specification was designed for the same read speed as CD digital audio. All of the other rendering formats and templates create different bitrates. For example, WMV @ 500 kbps is about half the data rate as VCD, so you'd get about double the play time. The 3Mbps template is over double the rate, so expect less than half the total time to fit.

Things get a little harder to calculate with variable-bitrate formats and templates, such as MPEG-2, so your best bet is to render a representative part of your project, see how many times that file would fit in 650M, and multiple that time the length of the render.

Professional DVD compressionists have to do the same things, as they too have a "bit budget" and when you're trying to pack lots of soundtracks and extras on a 9G disc, it gets pretty tight.

Finally, very high bitrate files (such as those intended for DVD) won't playback from some CD-ROM drives simply because they can't sustain the necessary bitrate.

///d@
fcib wrote on 6/7/2002, 7:26 PM
Dennis:
Thanks so much. New to the business. Need your experience.....

What is the process for putting your clips back on DV tape, and do you have to capture them every time you start your project?

When you talked about MEG1 VCD, do you recommend rendering to CD using this
format? If not, which one would you recommend?
BillyBoy wrote on 6/7/2002, 10:34 PM
"What is the process for putting your clips back on DV tape, and do you have to capture them every time you start your project?"

Using "Print to tape" will get it back to your camera. Depending on your camera, you can do this from the timeline, use the capture/print to tape utility or my preferred method, just render to disk, then go back to DV tape later. You only need to "capture" once, this will write to your selected hard drive which for best results and to avoid the chance of dropped frames should be a dedicated seperate hard drive, not just a partition on some drive your OS or applications share.

The project file "remembers" whatever changes you make, so no need to render till you're totally finished with your project. You do need to save your project which is just a tiny sized file. Your original source files remain untouched no matter what you add/remove/change during the editing process.

"When you talked about MEG1 VCD, do you recommend rendering to CD using this
format? If not, which one would you recommend?"

To make a VCD click File, render as, under the 'save as type' select Main Concept Mpeg-1, under templace pick either VCD NTSC (US) or VCD PAL(most rest of world). If you want better quality also click on custom and push the slider for video quality all the way to the right. If you project has lots of action in it, the quality of VCD isn't that good due to limitations imposed by the required bitrate ceiling. You can make SVCD (use MPEG-2) for better quality.