thta is my question. I now have about 12.3 gigs left on my drive is this enough space for a 95min film captured as an AVI file??

-- Doug F (mazinz@aol.com), December 02, 1999

Answers

Without compression, you can compute the space that you are needed like this :

95 min x 60 (second) x 3 byte (true color) x 30 (frame per second) x 352 x 240 (NTSC VCD standard) = 43.338.240.000 byte Wow !!!!????

With MPEG-1 (VCD) coding, you only need roughly 1 GB for the same duration.

-- A A Arman (aa@elga.net.id), December 02, 1999.

Maybe you want to have some compressed AVI. Codecs like Indeo 5.11 produces quite good quality, with setting of 90% and quick compress. I use the VirtualDub software and the codecs to do that.

-- Rusman Priyana (priyana@eudoramail.com), December 03, 1999.

Before anything, you should become aware to the answers to these questions: -What video and audio codec are you using? What codecs are there on your computer? What codecs came with and are supported by your vidcap card? Different codecs have particular advantages and disadvantages of their own and although nearly all produce files with extension .avi nonetheless produce wildly different filesizes, all other things being equal. Even a particular codec will allow you to specify how much compression for a given quality, and therefore how big the resulting filesize will be. -What resolution are you using? Resolutions are commonly referred to in SIF, with, for NTSC, 704x480 considered full-res, 352x480 half- res, and 352x240 (VCD resolution) quarter-res. Okay for a concrete example, the vidcap card I use is a Marvel G200. If I use the MJPEG codec that came with it with minimal compression (4:1), full 44k/16b/stereo PCM audio, and half-res, I can capture 12m40s worth of video for a 2Gb filesize. Therefore a 95min video will require about 7.5Gb. The capture will produce four .avi files, the first three 2Gb each and the last 1.5Gb.

-- EMartinez (epmartinez@hotmail.com), December 04, 1999.

So sorry there was a slip-up in my computation: make that 15Gb (!). Yes, with the codec and parameters I've stated, a 95min video will require 15Gb of HDD space, which will consist, after capture is over, of seven 2Gb files and a one 1Gb file. That's why there are 20Gb drives out there now and thank God they are not expensive. Gak!

-- EMartinez (epmartinez@hotmail.com), December 04, 1999.

Hi guys

Think the calculation for file size gives the un compressed size and needs to be divided by the compression ratio of the avi file. Also I think the factor 3 is really only 2bits/pixel. The compression ratio for the file is probably between 4 & 10 so:

95 x 60 x 30 x 2 x 352 x 240/4 = 6888M or 6.7G.

In any event a vcd only holds about 74 minutes I think.

Whilst it is nice to encode from un compressed avi files most stand alone encoders are subject to an input file size of 2G, roll on Windows 2000.

I am currently working a 36 minute video in PAL which will be encoded directly from the full frame size on the timeline, here are the size sums: Using a DV compression of 5:1

36 x 60 x 25 x 2 x 720 x 576/5 = 8.2G of source which will encode to about 36/74 x 650 = 316M on the VCD. My video drive is a 9.5G Maxtor.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), December 09, 1999.