MPEG2 Compression

tocsese wrote on 3/3/2006, 8:48 AM
Newbie question here. I am capturing home movies from old VHS tapes by running them through my digital camcorder, making the signal digital. I get these gigantic files on my hard drive, 30-40 gigs. Can I render them to MPEG2 to compress them down to something that will fit on a DVD, and then later resave them back to AVI for editing?

Comments

Former user wrote on 3/3/2006, 8:55 AM
You can but you don't want to.

The AVI that it captures is the best quality you will get from your footage.

If you compress it to an MPEG, you will take a quality hit as well as MPEGs are not designed as an edit format. They are a delivery format, and as such can be sluggish when editing and sometimes will get audio sync problems.

Better to edit from the original capture AVI. If you are going to get even slightly serious about video editing, invest in as much harddrive space as you can.

Dave T2
tocsese wrote on 3/3/2006, 9:12 AM
Thanks! I was not intending to edit the MPEG2, just uncompress it later. So uncompressing the MPEG2 back to AVI is a bad idea?
kentwolf wrote on 3/3/2006, 12:39 PM
>>So uncompressing the MPEG2 back to AVI is a bad idea?

Yes.
riredale wrote on 3/3/2006, 7:26 PM
DV avis run about 13GB/hour. You can buy a 250GB drive for maybe $100 if you keep an eye out for specials.

Compressing a DV avi down to MPEG2 will reduce the size from 13GB/hr to maybe 4GB/hr. You won't take much of a hit quality-wise, especially if you're coming from VHS to begin with. But there will be a lot of rendering time on both ends, and getting a big drive makes more sense to many.