Capture best quality at smallest size?

drguitar wrote on 3/10/2002, 9:38 AM

I am a newbee to the Video Factory program. What is the best quality (at least VCR quality) that I can capture and edit at with the least space used on my harddrive? I have a dedicated 30gig HD for video and audio editing but the capture seems to eat that up in minutes. Am I doing something wrong? Did I install my program minus compression codecs? Could someone throw mw a bone...
TIA
Mike

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 3/10/2002, 2:52 PM

The best balance between quality and size is to use DV AVI files. These are broadcast quality, but are only 1/5 the size of uncompressed AVI. They take up about 225MB per minute, which should give you over 160 minutes on your 30GB drive. If you're capturing from a DV camera, or using an analog -> DV converter, this will be the default format for your captures.

If you're using an analog capture card that doesn't support DV, then i would suggest capturing sections in uncompressed AVI and rendering them to DV AVI files as you go. MPEG is really a last resort choice. Not only is it very poor to use for source files, but it takes a lot longer to do your editing/rendering with them.

drguitar wrote on 3/12/2002, 10:10 PM

How do I capture in DV AVI format. I do not see where that is an option in the program. I use an ATI Radeon All In Wonder for capture, so I can't tell you if it supports DV AVI.

Chienworks wrote on 3/13/2002, 4:03 PM

The ATI cards are analog capture cards. You can capture in MPEG with the ATI software (this absolutely sucks!) or you can capture in uncompressed AVI which is about 1.2GB per minute. I would suggest capturing chunks as long as you can (if you're using Win98 or ME you will be limited to 4GB or about 3 minutes), loading these AVI files onto the timeline, and rendering them back out to DV AVI files. You can then delete the original file you captured.