I'm capturing from my Canon ZR700 mini DV via firewire. My C:\ drive is the destination. problem is my computer only has about 145 gigs. I have a hell of a lot more tapes than 14 considering each tape may take 10 gigabytes of space. To me thats a ridiculous amount, but I also want to spare as much quality as possible. I had previously been using Windows Movie Maker to capture as I think you might be aware of from my other thread. I didn't realize how much it compressed everything. What do most people do or what do you do? I'm sure there are tons of people with a lot more footage than me and with much higher quality footage at that.

DV video is ~18 minutes per 4 gigs. If your source is a DV camera (MIni DV) then this is your optimum quality. Vegas can only capture direct from firewire at this quality level. It is basically a file transfer.

Anything smaller will lose quality. If you are going to get serious about the quality of your video, you need to consider adding harddrive storage. That is the nature of video.

If you are happy with the captures you get from Movie Maker, you can continue doing that and change the Aspect Ratio setting for your videos that you import into Vegas.

Dave T2

A MiniDV tape costs around $5.
It holds roughly 13GB of data.
Disk space to hold 13GB costs $1.30.

Do the maths, buy the disk(s) and move on.

Bob.

Yeah thanks I didn't know that. no need to get snide.

AND .. use the new disk(s) as extra drives .. don't replace your C: drive.

Well you can .. if you also add a D: drive, but my point is you get better performance if your video files are not on the same disk as your Vegas program (I assume that's your boot disk)

If you value what's on these tapes (i.e., they are memories that you want to keep) then you really should consider capturing at their native DV quality (13GB/hr) and getting an extra hard drive. A 1TB drive is only $99. If you don't want to open your computer case, you can get a 320GB WD MyPassport for $89 and it plugs right into your USB port. It will hold 24hrs of DV video. Just buy more when you need the extra space.

~jr

Actually, prices have dropped a lot in the last couple of months. 1 TB as low as $69, 1.5 TB at $99. Check around for deals.

@ brighterside: Good to know, thanks.

@JohhnyRoy and musicvid: Yeah, I've been looking at some stuff and will probably go with a 1 TB one. I didn't realize how cheap they are. I'm going to have to do a lot of recapturing. Thanks.

Hello. I'm having a problem with capturing through Vegas. Everyone has told me that Vegas captures the DV tape in its native format. When I played the captured video, there was a comb effect when there was movement, like spaced lines making up things rather than a solid picture. This is what led me to use Windows Movie Maker to capture video. I understand that it is not the best way to do things, but I never had any comb effect. I also used to import the wmvs captured in WMM into Vegas, which didn't have any lines or anything before, but after I rendered, did. I don't see how there could be any problem but Vegas. Hopefully theres a solution.

Look up the word "interlace" in Google.

DV-AVI is "interlaced."

This is not a problem. Not with Vegas. Not with your video.

If you play back your video in Media Player, the "INTERLACING" will not show because it is being "DEINTERLACED."

There is no "solution" needed.

Oooooh, alright I understand now. So there shouldn't be any visible lines when I put it on DVD or back to tape, considering i'm not viewing it on a progressive scan screen right?

Right.

Thanks for clearing that up. My naivety has caused me more detriment than I would have anticipated.

Your naivete' is more sophisticated than mine?

I have a friend who's online tag is "My insecurities aren't as good as yours." :)