Dv captured directly at 320*240 - Help please !

[softfx]

How would like to be able to cpture my DV footage directly at 320*240 instead of 720*480.

The reason for this is that I have lots of 1 hour clips to send on the web for streaming viewing.

I use to capture with normal settings and then create a 320*240 project with "scale to fit" option enabled.

But I realized that if my original is already at 320*240, the encoding to .wmv is much faster. And the hole idea is to save as much time as possible in the process.

I did try to capture with windows movie maker, they offer the possibility to capture directly at 320*240 in .wmv format. Its ok , but the problem with this is that its already compressing the video in .wmv and after my edit ill compress AGAIN in .wmv resulting in a big lost of quality.

Is their anyway i could just capture at 320.240 with a lose codec that keeps a lot of quality in the footage ?

My filnal outputs are compressed at 150kb , and compressing them twice in .wmv is not good !

Any ideas guys ?

-L

[JeremyIrons]

I have not heard of a card that supports 320x240 DV. The ones that offer direct DV capture are Firewire based and the internal CODEC is set for 720x480 (NTSC). I think your left with 720x480 capture and do the software resize thing within your editor.

[Video Dude]

DV is not "captured". Don't confuse it with a capture card because it is not.

The video is copied or transferred over the 1394 cable to the computer. It is a 1:1 copy. So if you have a NTSC camera the video will always be 720x480 transferred over the cable.


Now there is software (for example Ulead) that will do a real time MPEG conversion of the DV. And then there is Movie Maker like you said that converts is to wmv real time.

For best quality, resize and compress the DV after you edit it. You make the quality worse by compressing twice.

[bb]

A possible way is to use a DV capture capable program which can resize and encode to a lossless format in realtime. I've never tried it myself, but the capture software iuVCR is capable of "capturing" ("streaming" would be a better word) DV, and you can add filters, choose the output format and a VfW codec. I recommend to use Huffyuv to encode the video to avoid any losses.

iuVCR homepage: http://www.iulabs.com/iuvcr/index.shtml

Hope this helps.

bb

[softfx]

BB , exacly what i was looking for... Thanks !