Compression on capture from MiniDV?

tartuffo wrote on 9/17/2004, 8:21 AM
Is there any way to get the ScreenBlast Video Capture tool to save the video at anything less sizeable than uncompressed AVI?

I've upgraded to MovieStudio from the free Microsoft "Windows Movie Maker", and they have an option to save in "High quality video (NTSC)" (stored in a WMV file) instead of AVI. This results in a capture of a 1 hour tape being about 1 Gb. That is way way smaller than AVI, which looks like it is taking about 1 Gb every four minutes!

MS claims that this compressed format is fine for DVD-quality (see http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/expert/bridgman_burndvd.mspx).

Just wondering if a) there is a similar configurable capture format/compression in MovieStudio, and if so, b) what is recommended for burning a DvD.

Thanks!

Nick

Comments

Former user wrote on 9/17/2004, 8:30 AM
If you are capturing from a MiniDV camera, it is a compressed AVI. It is compressed in the camera. An uncompressed AVI is about 5x larger.

If you want the best quality DVD, you should start with the best quality video, which is normally the native format of your video source, in this case DV AVI.

Anything that is compressed will only get worse looking as you create your DVD.

Dave T2
rondi wrote on 9/17/2004, 12:09 PM
Dave T2 is correct. keep the highest quality video you can and edit that. as i recall, when downloading MiniDV, i have read expect 1hour to require 13gb of disk storage, and this may be just for video---audio is added on top of that.

hth,
ron