Video Capture

PastorKevin wrote on 12/6/2004, 3:13 PM
Trying to capture video from a tape to AVI, to be rendered as DVD. The video is about 90 minutes long, and the file size is over 30G before rendering. Is it necessary to capture a 30G file when it will be rendered down to under 5G for DVD when it is finsihed? We are running out of drive space... thought maybe we were capturing too much detailed data that the DVD wont get anyway.

Is there a better way to do the capture and keep the file size more like the DVD will need for the finished product?

Thanks!

Comments

GaryKleiner wrote on 12/6/2004, 3:22 PM
There are different hardware/software setups that will capture directly to MPEG2. Vegas is not one of them.

DV runs about 13 Gigs per hour, so 90 minutes would be about 20 Gigs or so.

Gary
busterkeaton wrote on 12/6/2004, 3:50 PM
You are not capturing too much data for the DTD. The avi file does not contain "too much" data for DVD, this is data will be used by the mpeg encoder. To get the best quality DVD, you want to start with the highest quality file in the first place. If you compressed the avi file to a smaller format and then made the DVD, you would have two generations of loss and your DVD will look noticeably poorer.

When you encode the higher the quality you start with, the higher the quality you get on the back end. The converse of this is often stated as "garbage in, garbage out."
nickle wrote on 12/6/2004, 8:42 PM
I'm not sure what kind of "tape" you want to capture from. but if it is a dv camera tape, then perhaps you want to do a "batch capture".

You review the tape and select in and out points for the clips you want and then batch capture them.

Thus you reduce the amount of data to that which you find relevant.

I have never done it and if you ask any questions I'll be in over my head.

But someone else will likely help if that is in fact what you want to do.