Yet Another Newbie Question

Hello all, I have windows XP on a 1.4 ghz with 512 megs of ram and a
40 gig HD pc with a NVDIA ti4200 128 meg card. I want to capture VHS
Movies and concert videos to burn to DVDR. I tried to copy a concert
video that was 115 mins. (using my video card and sound card as
capture hardware) long using Virtualdub and huffyuv. I captured at
720X480 and used huffyuv. I have 32 gigs of free HD space and after 1
hr. the process was stopped because my drive was full. Am I doing
anything wrong other than maybe capturing at too high of a resolution?
What res. should I use without losing anything and should I use Mpeg
instead of Huffyuv?

TIA

 

1st, read here http://www.dvdrhelp.com

2nd, buy a BIG 2nd hard drive (I have a 20gig C drive for ONLY my
software and a 100gig D drive for ONLY my video files)

Since huffy is a "lossless" codec it creates very large files

Most people use a variation of the DV codec, which creates files
at about 13gig per hour

If you do not plan to do any editing you could capture straight
to mpeg, but since is designed as an OUTPUT format, you will find
that many (most?) editing packages do not do a good job @ edits

John Thomas Smith
http://www.direct2usales.com
http://www.pacifier.com/~jtsmith

 

Thanks John, I don't really want to buy a new HD since I only have
about ten tapes I want to copy. I have been reading dvdrhelp but there
is so much info there it gets confusing after a while. I am not
planning on editing my videos, I only want to have chapters on them.
You are saying that I should capture straight to MPEG? Witch one would
you suggest? Also what res. would you suggest?

Thanks Again,
Kirk

 

Your drive is not big enough. For VHS tapes, you can capture at 352X480
which is called half-D1 and it is still DVD compatible and this might fit
you space on the drive. The quality will be very close to the source VHS
tape and will probably be better than trying to capture directly to mpeg2.
Your computer might not be fast enough to capture directly to mpeg2. Give
352X480 a try. The best would be to capture in DV format, but you need to
have a DV codec and they are not usually free.

You might try to use the Movie maker app that is included in WinXP, just
make sure you download the latest version. It might give you more capture
choices.

Mike T

 

Thanks Mike, I'm going to do some more reading and maybe give the
lower res. a try.

 

If you want to get the best quality, other than buying a bigger
harddrive, you can capture as much as you can, encode it to mpeg, then
capture the rest, encode the rest, then join both parts.