Thanks. Is there any way to change this and save it directly to mpeg or quicktime?

blc

Not with Vegas.

Marco

do you know any standalone software to do so?

Hey, thanks for you help!

blc

There is hardware that will capture to MPEG2 and other formats, but what's the point? You loose valueable data by doing so. Unless you are not gonna edit. But then, why use any NLE?

From the little that I know about things Apple there's no practical difference between capturing as AVI or QT. Both are just wrappers, the actual video content is the same. I suspect you could even find a utility that'll rewrite the wrapper.
MPEG is an entirely different matter. It requires the data coming from the tape to undergo temporal compression and trying to do a good job of this in realtime is a big ask of any software as it's relying on the CPU being fast enough. TYpically this is done with dedicated hardware. But as has been said, why would one want to do this?

Bob.

mmm...in fact I would like to convert old vhs tape to dvd and to do so, when I capture a full tape the file size is larger than my disks ex: 60 minutes make 75gb. It takes a lot of space and also a lot of time to first capture and then render.

Well maybe I should think about a realtime video encoding device?

thanks for the input!

blc

75GB for 60 minutes? That sounds like you are capturing uncompressed 16 bit. How are you connecting the VCR to the computer? What capture hardware are you using? Lots of us get good results by using some sort of analog to DV converter and capture a DV stream to AVI which is about 225MB/minute. At that rate 60 minutes would be about 13GB instead of 75. DV files are just as easily editable as uncompressed. In fact, editing and rendering them is usually faster because there is a lot less data to process.

If you're just converting VHS to DVD why not just get a set top DVD recorder, you don't even need Vegas at all. You can get them for around $300 these days.

Hello
You say that vegas captures in DV AVI 2.0 type 2 format but I cant find any info as to the interlacing ratio. Does anyone know what this is for Vegas Capture?

Thanks

Richard

...interlacing ratio

Is this what you want to know?
NTSC: 30 frames/second = 60 fields/second.
PAL: 25 frames/second = 50 fields/second.

Mike

Remember that when you capture DV25 you're really just doing a data dump from the tape. Your capture program will download the data and slap a header on the file. It may be a quicktime header or an AVI header but the data is the same. This is why you don't really get choices of capture format.

For MPEG capture you can use a converter or processor card. We use a Digital Rapids card to take the stuff in over SDI. The computer then transcodes to MPEG2. We recently had to buy a new machine for this-it's a dual processor box with a 64bit slot for the digital rapids card. We needed this to keep up with the video feed. (BTW, I'm just an employee. I had nothing to do with the hardware path.)

You could also get an outboard encoder. On the cheap side there's the ADS Instant DVD+DV which I've heard is "surprisingly good". It's unclear whether the box gives you DV deck control or not.

Rob Mack