(newbie) Capturing video w/ firewire & minidv

Jasper Bluto wrote on 9/13/2006, 12:08 AM

Hi,
First time here. You guys seem totally helpful and pro - I hope this is an easy one.
I have a sony MiniDV camcorder and a P4 1.7ghz machine with XP pro (I know - ouch...slooooooow). I can capture video using FireWire with Vegas Video 6 (or V V 3.0) just fine, but the file sizes are HUGE! I have 10 hours of video to get off DV tapes, but nowhere near the HD space to do it via firewire capture. I bought a cheap USB hardware analog video capture box (ADS instant DVD 2.0). Of course the quality suffers, but I can control the file size/quality.

Am I just mental? Is there some trick to getting video out of my camcorder via firewire at a similar quality / rate / file size to the files I render to burn to DVD - which is about 30-40 megs per minute?

Speaking of that... (question #2)... I am using one of the templates in Vegas 6 to render my edited video. It's an MPEG2 template called NTSC DVD. is that the best one for quality/size ratio? It says:

720 x 480 x 32
29.97 fps interlaced
44k stereo audio
MPEG layer 2

I rendered a file that's 1 minute, 4 seconds and the size is 32.75mb.

I hope someone out there can set me straight. I hope I can figure out what my first pet's name is so I can get back into this site, then find my way back here and see if anyone left a reply.

Thanks in advance!
Jasper Bluto

Comments

IanG wrote on 9/13/2006, 1:50 AM

I don't know about your mental state - I'm not too sure about my own - but what you're seeing is completely normal. The avi files from MiniDV are big!! Reducing the quality before you even start editing is a bad move - you're almost certainly going to reduce it even more when you come to encode for DVD (I'm assuming that's where you want to end up?) and you may find it becomes unacceptable. Keep the quality as high as possible for as long as possible - not only do you get the best results, your system's having to do less work* to process your media and the whole editing process is much quicker, smoother and more enjoyable.

I think you've got three options -
1/ Get a bigger disk - they're getting cheaper every day and having two disks is a good configuration for video editing anyway (the IO's quicker)
2/ Work with smaller volumes of your media - do you really need all ten hours available at once? If you render small pieces as you go, and maybe write them back to tape for storage, you can combine them later.
3/ Start editing before you even download your clips - do you really plan to use all that footage? Remember Sturgeon's law - "90% of everything is crap". I don't think VidCap is all that helpful for this, but take a look at Scenalyzer, which has a preview option such that you can quickly get a visual "index" of what's on the tapes and then just capture the scenes you want.

As to your choice of template, that depends on what you want to end up with - if you're going to be producing a DVD in NTSC land, then the NTSC DVD template's the obvious choice. Sadly, it may not be the right one! The problem's the size of your output. A single layer DVD can only hold 4.7 GByte, but VMS doesn't take this into account when it does its encoding. It uses a fixed set of values, and if that means your output file is too big to fit then that's tough luck! DVDAS, on the other hand, has the option to make your output small enough to fit on a DVD, but you really should use avi as the input, and that means using a different template for the render in VMS.

Speaking very personaly, I'd start out out with the intention of getting my finished movie to be as small as possible (other people's home movies are stupefyingly boring!) and then worry about the details of how it's going to get on to DVD when I know how long it is.

Ian G.

* OK, there's more IO, but even so....

rustier wrote on 9/13/2006, 9:26 AM

You may also want to consider adding a new hard drive. I myself am on a budget, but the price of hard drives these days are particularly cheap and finding one to handle your huge project on a budget should be pretty easy.

You may run into audio sync problems if you use a USB connection (been there done that). As you said your quality will suffer using this method as mpeg is a lossy format ( your data degrades with each "generation".)

I had a huge project like you and decided that a two part disc set was the best way to go. I only had to work with half the project at a time.

Firewire is without a doubt the best and "preferred" method of capture. I believe the latest version 7 of VMS has AC-3 audio support which will help reduce the size of your project. You might want to look into that.

Have fun with it!