Hi, I will be delighted if you can help me on this one. I am considering entering the audio visual arena. My field of expertise is digital audio editing and midi music production. My experience in av is somewhere between limited and zero, however I am very good at learning and manipulating software applications.

It is my intention to raise some extra cash by offering a video to CD transfer service in my local area. The service will be to transfer home video recordings from VHS, SVHS & 8mm formats to CDR.

My pressent system:

Pentium II 450 1x 10 gig HD 1x 4.2 gig HD HP 8100 CDRW Yamaha 8424 CDRW 160 mb ram 17" monitor 16 meg AGP graphics card Emagic AW8 sound card Loads audio software

These are my questions:

1. Is the Fast Clip Master capture card suitable for the type of work that I have in mind? If not please recommend a device for under #500. sterling

2. What is the maximum length of compressed video footage a 74 min & 80 min CDR holds?

3. Will Adobe premier 5.1 make the job any easier?

4. Can this card work with both PAL and NTSC input and output?

5. How long does it take to compress 1 hour of video?

Please help me with this as I am a novice here and would really like to get into this area.

Thanks

Chris.

-- Chris David (cdc1@lineone.net), July 13, 2000

Answers

Chris,

You have no business getting into the business until you learn the answers to the above questions for yourself. You will only do your customers a disservice, and give the rest of us a bad name.

It seems you are looking for an easy answer on how to do commercial VCD or MPG video files, and there is no such thing. Spend the time to learn the basics first. I will not give away my hard learned lessons to any Joe Schmuck that just asks for it in a post. Apply Yourself.

-- Tom (tjones06@hotmail.com), July 14, 2000.

Hi Chris,

I'm learning too, and as you have just discovered this isn't a particularly friendly forum. I don't know about the capture card you're using but your system looks up to the task. Adobe Premiere is a highly regarded NLE but I find it's flaky on PCs; at least it is with my Matrox Marvel. A lot of folks use Ulead's Media Studio NLE. You only really need NLEs if you're doing editing. Using software compression, expect between 6:1 to 9:1 compression times. To get clued up, spend some time trolling the archives at the bottom of the home page here. Here are some other sites that will help you learn more:

http://www.vcdhelper.com/ http://members.xoom.com/ksong1222/main.htm http://aussie01.freeservers.com/

That oughta get you started.

Good luck!

-- Frank Marshall (new_wave@one.net.au), July 14, 2000.

Chris,

At least you are being honest as to your intention :) There's nothing wrong with enterprising as long as you do not plan to cheat your customers. A/V is not as hard as you think...if you can do audio..you can conquer this VCD stuff quite easily. 500 pounds will buy you a respectable Mpeg hardware encoder which will encode your VCD for you in realtime. Look at www.bernclare.com and www.arrays.com for the hardwares. The other sites that the previous poster has mentioned will give you some insite as what to expect from this A/V world. One other place you may want to look is http://www.members.home.net/richa/....good luck with your business :))

-- lnguyen (wingstarzz@hotmail.com), July 14, 2000.