Which Codec should I capture in for MiniDV over Firewire

[AussieHusky]

Hi, Im currently taking video off of my MiniDV camera via firewire and onto my laptop which has fairly limited hard drive space, The video will later be converted to Mpeg2 for DVD authoring but I need an intermediary codec to take what is coming directly from the camera, I am looking for something that is fairly lossless, and wont react badly when later converted into mpeg 2, but Im hoping to get under 10gigs for 60 minutes of video, What codec would you recomend? It also cant be to strenuous for the CPU to encode as the laptop that will be doing the initial recording is just a 1.7ghz Pentium M and I dont want to many lost frames.

[mats.hogberg]

You're asking for the impossible.
Get an external USB2 HDD to save out your DV avi to. DV is what qualifies as "fairly lossless". The only viable option AFAICS is something that encodes to mpeg2 in realtime which seems unlikely with a 1.7 GHz box.

/Mats

[edDV]

Hi, Im currently taking video off of my MiniDV camera via firewire and onto my laptop which has fairly limited hard drive space, The video will later be converted to Mpeg2 for DVD authoring but I need an intermediary codec to take what is coming directly from the camera, I am looking for something that is fairly lossless, and wont react badly when later converted into mpeg 2, but Im hoping to get under 10gigs for 60 minutes of video, What codec would you recomend? It also cant be to strenuous for the CPU to encode as the laptop that will be doing the initial recording is just a 1.7ghz Pentium M and I dont want to many lost frames.

Why not transfer DV in segments and edit say 10-20 minutes at a time and then encode to DVD MPeg2. DV is low in CPU load during capture. DV is still the best way to edit.

After working the segments, the resulting MPeg2 files can be assembled during the authoring stage.

This is basically what I did on my old 750MHz PIII laptop which only had an 18GB hard drive.

[AussieHusky]

I would rather not stream in real time as any mpeg2 converter is going to be fairly bad quality in that scenario. What codec is DV? Is that just .AVI with "DV video encoder" Codec?

[aedipuss]

you're pretty clueless eh? got the jargon but not the jist. the guys just gave you the best answers and you reply with nonsense. DVavi is what is streamed to your computer from your cam over firewire. no conversion. trying to encode it to something else on the fly from your cam will only cause loss of frames and bad video.

[guns1inger]

Yes, DV is the codec. AVI is the container in which the video is stored. Given you are asking for 60 minutes in 10 GB, and DV only requires 13 GB for 60 minutes, you are really only risking quality loss for no great gain. You don't have much choice about real-time capture - DV transfer is real-time no matter how you go about it. I would agree with Mats - buy an external HDD and keep the video there until you are ready to use it. The only viable intermediate codecs will require a lot more space than your machine has, and more computing power to capture than DV.

[thecoalman]

Just to add if thats all you have left is 10gigs you'r going to need a lot of that for temporary files created during the authoring process..