I understand that one does video capture of a vhs movie first into an avi file and then convert that into an mpeg before burning the vcd. My question is: how much hard disk space is needed for the avi file from a typical movie? Or does one do the capture in parts?

Thanks

-- Donald Lee (donald.lee@usa.net), February 20, 2001

Answers

Donald,

You will want to use a codec that compresses as much as your hardware will allow.

If you can compress directly to MPG1 or MPG2, great! You can expect to generate files at 10 Meg/min and 20 Meg/min repectively.

If not, then you will want to compress using MJPEG or, again, using an AVI codec that compresses as much as your hardware will allow. I've found that AVI compression can range (very ball park) from 2 Gig/15min raw (1:1 ?) to 15 Meg/15min for DivX;) (MPG4 video/ MP3 audio).

With (limited) hardware, I capture video AVI raw in 10 minute segments which I use to construct VCD's with successive segments. I overlap the initial segment captures and try to make clean breaks between scenes. When the VCD plays the finished segments one after another, the segment break are noticeable, but with home video, is acceptable. With a quality video, probably not.

-- me (snake_mountain@hotmail.com), February 20, 2001.

I capture to AVI first because this where you get the best quality and it is almost impossible to edit an MPG file. I can capture, at the highest setting on my card, a little less than 30 minutes per 2 gigabytes.

-- Al (amccraw@yahoo.com), February 20, 2001.

I agreed that it is best to capture raw AVI file first then convert them later. This gives best quality VCD. Hardware encoder encodes very fast but the result are not as good (and cannot be improved) unless you spend lot of money for the professional stuff. What you need is a very big hard drive (fairly cheap these days): at DV quality (720x480 resolution), it takes 13GB / hour of DV video. A 30GB drive will give you at least 2 hours of DV video capture.

-- (ktnwin@excite.com), February 20, 2001.

Donald,

I capture to an avi file in uncompressed RGB, PAL format, CD quality audio. 73 min of video play that will fit on a VCD make 31GB of avi files. When I encode this to MPEG1 I use another 680MB of space. It is all done in parts unless you are running Windows NT4 or some such operating system that doesn't limit file size. Common limit is 2GB while my limit under Win98 SE is about 4GB.

Regards Mike

-- Mike (no.one@xtra.co.nz), February 23, 2001.

How could there be such a big difference in these answers?

-- Tom Calvert (thcalvert@aep.com), January 18, 2002.