Rookie - File size from nearly Full Hi-8 Tape

Macattak1 wrote on 10/16/2007, 3:52 PM
Greetings,

MS 8+ Plat

I don't know much about video file sizes and such. I am surprised that my 90% Hi-8 tape captured by MS8+ Plat is 5.8 GB. I know it needs to be <4.7 GB.

My intro and end is simple text and maybe 10 sec total for both.

Any quick, simple, easy ideas?

To be honest. I have About 10 Hi-8's to move to DVD. The rest are Super 8's. I am not doing much editing other than blank and dead spaces. I have lost my 7 year old daughter and just recently my father in law so I bought this to move the tapes to DVD and burn and copy for family, etc. I am not prepared to put in hours on each tape. I do not have the energy for it.

Any help is much appreciated.

Peace and Blessings

Comments

Terry Esslinger wrote on 10/16/2007, 5:00 PM
Dv.avi is about 13G per hour of video and that is how it is captured into Vegas. However to put it on DVD it must be rendered to mpeg2 which decreases the size considerably. You can then play with the bit rate and it is not unrealistic to get 2 hours worth of Hi8 tape onto a single DVD in a quality that is acceptable (depending on the person)
BTW is you "Super8" film or some sort of tape?
Macattak1 wrote on 10/16/2007, 6:44 PM
Current Sony Handycam is DCR-TRV350. This is Digital.
Previous Handycam was like a 250 or something. That was Not digital.

Current tape is Tape #1.
This is a Super-8 TAPE.

Well, for what ever reason I could not find the file once I closed DVD arch. Not sure why. I started to capture a new tape. Tape #2. This time it asked me set up questions that it did not do the very first time when I captured #1. So. I dumped #1 cause I am a control freek. I am capturing #2 now and I know exactly where the files are going to this time.

So I will start clean and follow my steps better this time and see what happens. Check back tomorrow if you have time to see what my challenges are by then.

Thanks.

Peace and Blessings
Chienworks wrote on 10/16/2007, 7:13 PM
I don't believe there was ever anything called "super 8 tape". There was 8mm tape, Hi-8 tape, and digital-8 tape. The only things with "super" in the name are 8mm film and SVHS.
dogwalker wrote on 10/16/2007, 7:29 PM
Macattak1, are you saying that the avi file which you captured from your camcorder is 5.8 GB, or that you've already encoded it as an mpeg2 file, and it's the mpeg2 file which is 5.8 GB?
Ivan Lietaert wrote on 10/16/2007, 9:08 PM
This may be relevant also: if you work on a FAT32 formatted disk, files cannot be larger than 4GB. So if you capture a 1 hour tape, you will end up with a file exceeding that limit (1 hour dv-avi equals 13GB), and you will get a warning about this.
Mpg2 conversion is 1/5 compared with dv-avi, so then you will stay below the 4GB limit.

If you create a partition with NTFS, there is no size limit.

I've just bought a new external storage device (Lacie 320 Gb, usb2). It comes preformatted in FAT32, so the first thing I did was to change it to NTFS. This took 1 second (with fast fomat of XP).
cmcdonald wrote on 10/17/2007, 8:14 AM
At the risk of sounding totally stupid, let me ask this question. How do you determine if your drive is formated as FAT32 or NTSF?
Ivan Lietaert wrote on 10/17/2007, 9:25 AM
Rightclick on the disk icon and select 'properties'. NTFS is only recognized by Windows 2000, XP and Vista. Formatting a disk will erase all data on a disk, so you must do this before you start using the drive.
fishbelt wrote on 10/17/2007, 9:26 AM
Watch the boot page when you restart your computer. It should tell you the file system your using.