Capture Quality Too High?

[kinglogo]

i use dazzle or unlead video and i havent got into then too much yet but i see that if you have the setting too high, a 90 min concert lets say, that im capturing from my vcr, might be like 15gb's or something. i have the room but what happens when i try to convert it? i know it will take along time but wont the converted file still be too big to burn on a dvd disk? i would try it but im sure people here have already been through all this and it would be cool if someone that knows about the settings for some of these programs could let me know what worked for them. i want best quality possibe but still be able to fit it on a dvd disk. most of my stuff is 2hours or less. most of it being less. i guess if you too much on a tape like 4-5 hours you would want to split it on 2 disks. and help? thanks

[Jazz]

I don't do this for very long yet, but what makes sense to me is the principle that the quality of your source can never be high enough. You always have the option to compromise between quality and size as you process it, but an low quality source will hunt you forever.

Other than that, I think you won't have a problem to fit your 15G stuff on 1 DVD if you experiment a little with the filtering and compression. Good luck!

[jacobjef]

I'm not sure on the exact details at the moment, but if what your talking about is encoded to mpeg2 you should have no problems getting it onto dvd. Your quality will be fine, perhaps better if the right settings, etc are utilized. Do some some searching & reading in the forum on encoding. There's a vast wealth of knowledge and information within, you just need to find what's right for you!

[Ookami]

The quality cannot be too high. Of course a capture card that blurs the video will be easier to compress, but also you loose much details. If you want to make the movie more compressable, you can use some noise filters (but, only if you want invest much time for testing!)...

Check Doom9's guides, there you can find the guides how to set up your encoders for a specific size (example, Xvid to fit on 2 CDs)...

[kinglogo]

thanks for the tips. the only problem with capturing too high is this. i did a 5min capture from my vcr with highest settings and that was 5 gigs! what in the world would an 90-120 min tape do? i dont think anyone has that kind of room on their HD. i have an 80gb and you need room for the before and after. on highest settings theres no way it would fit. i'll keep checking these boards and it will take awhile but someday i'll get it going. thanks again

[fasttimes]

Originally posted by kinglogo
i did a 5min capture from my vcr with highest settings and that was 5 gigs! what in the world would an 90-120 min tape do? i dont think anyone has that kind of room on their HD. I have a total of 480GB for video capture and work space, plus another 50GB for temp DVD mastering space! And, I'm sure there are others that have twice, or more, of that amount.

Sounds like you are capturing "raw" RGB video. Try capturing using the lossless HuffYUV video codec, and select YUY/YUV as the colorspace (not RGB). This should be much smaller than your current attempts. Using HuffYUV with YUY2 colorspace VHS material, one hour runs about 30-40GB.

If that is still too big for you, you will have to resort to lossy compression. In that case, look at MJPEG codecs, at a high quality settings of 19.

In the end, you really should have at least one other drive anyway, for capturing and work space. Any modern 5400RPM drive is fast enough for video capture, and a 120GB drive can be had for under $120 from dealers on pricewatch.com. You can also find good prices from local stores, like CompUSA, on the "after mail-in rebates" deals.