I'm in the process of converting all my Digital8 footage to VCDs. Now, the majority of my tapes are 1.5 hours in length and some with and hour of footage.

Would it be best to: a. capture the entire digital8 tape? (larger file size) b. capture in increments (for example for a tape with an hour of footage, capture 3 segments of 20 min.) then join the 3 files when I burn to CD?

I have: P4 1.7G 40G Harddrive 256MB RAM

-- Bloo (barb.bloo@sympatico.ca), April 09, 2002

Answers

You'd better cut in segments to burn your VCD, and you'll feel easy to find what you want to see.

-- Frederic (frederic@eltw.nec.com.tw), April 09, 2002.

A question aside: don't you plan to edit your tapes after you've captured them?? Wouldn't that be nicer to commit to VCD?? If you're using Windows 98 or similar you won't be permitted to capture beyond 4GB which translates to about 18 mins of DV AVI. What I do (I have a Sony DCRTRV-120K D8 camcorder connected to a ADSTech Pyro DV PCI card) is I select segments on tape just before I hit the 2GB mark (my installation of Premiere 6 allows max file capture size of only 2GB which is a direct result of its insistence on using legacy VfW architecture DV type-2 to distinguish and separate it from THAT other NLE MediaStudioPro which is type-1) and this is by carefully observing the frame counter and hitting stop JUST before it reaches 16000 (on 29.97fps). You string these clips on the timeline then encode to VCD with TMPGenc through AVISynth. How to do this is explained in detailed in (and where I mostly learned the intricacies of Premiere-TMPGenc-AVISynth combo) www.geocities.com/aussie01au..:)

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), April 10, 2002.

Re:Digital 8 to VCD

I have been using ulead video 6 its a great program for creating video cds make sure you edit you tape so that is 60mins max,I created a one and half show with ulead video 6 only to find out it would not fit on a blank cdr...LOL

Also stay away from 90 mins Blank cdr as I have been told be a specilist that it can lead to problems playing in usa DVD players...

One last tip I've had a word with my supplier about the 90+ minute discs for video work,in a bid to stop piracy.

He thinks and so do I now that the discs might cause more problems with compability. The reason for this is that the 90+ minute track is finer than that of an 80 minute cd. And some older players may have problems with this.

Since I have been selling My video Cds from my Hypnotized.TV I have had no problems with them not working in Dvd players or the computer

Best of Luck Alex

-- Alexander Duvall (alex@hypnotized.TV), March 17, 2003.