Black bars on sides of video...

[bla4free]

Hi. I just captured a video from a Hi-8 camera using a USB video capture device. I used VirtualDub to capture the video. It captured fine, no errors. I applied a resize filter to resize it to a smaller video, keeping things proportional. I encoded the video in Divx and this is where my problems began.

1. The video is only 320x240 and 18 mins long; however, the file size is 437 MB. That seems a little too big to me. Maybe I'm missing something?

2. After resizing the video, I now have black bars on the sides of the screen. What caused this? How can I prevent them?

Thank you for your help!

[Baldrick]

1. Change/lower the audio and video bitrate to get smaller file size. You can use a bitrate calculator(see our tools list) to calculate the exact size.

2. Do you see the black bars in the right preview window in virtualdub?

[bla4free]

1. I tried doing that; but when I go to encode the video, the quality gets really bad. I've downloaded Divx movies that were wide and 1.5 hours long and were only 700 MB in size and perfect quality. I don't know what kind of settings I could possible change.

2. I feel stupid. It turns out there were no bars. Apparently, my media player doesn't get less than 350 pixels wide and the video was 320 pixels wide. Sorry.

[Baldrick]

1. Those downloaded divx videos has probably a better video source and you will then get better quality with lower bitrates.

Have you also lowered the audio bitrate?
What video capture settings are you using?
Can't you use a dv / firewire connection to copy the video from the hi8? You should then get better source quality.

[bla4free]

I have a firewire port on my PC there are only RCA out on the Hi8 player I'm using. How can I check with virtualdub the capture settings I was using? I probably had it set to the default settings.

[manono]

Check the audio format. Baldrick's implying you have WAV audio which can be considerably compressed with a conversion to MP3 audio. Open the AVI in VDub(Mod) and go File->File Information or open it in GSpot to find out the particulars of the audio. Also, comparing your video to a movie AVI is, as Baldrick says, an apples to oranges comparison. You'll almost certainly need a much higher bitrate for the same quality.

[bla4free]

Thanks manono. I changed the audio to mp3 and the size reduced a little. I just know whenever I rip a DVD w/ Handbrake, I can get a 1.5 hour movie down to 700 MB. I just figured 18 mins of video would be somewhere around 100 MB or so. I had no clue there was such a thing as capture quality. Thanks for the info!

[jagabo]

There are many things that effect the compressability of video. High frame rates, large frame sizes, noise (like off-air or consumer grade camcorder recordings), large amounts of motion, camera shake, smoke/fire, strobe lights, etc. all make a video less compressible.

In short, the more detail there is in a picture the less it compresses. And the more the picture changes from frame to frame the less it compresses.

Professionally mastered DVDs generally contain little noise, camera shake, or unnecessary motion, and contains progressive frames at 24 fps. Analog handheld camcorder footage usually has lots of noise, camera shake, and unnecessary motion, and is 30 fps interlaced. Hi8 camcorder sources will not compress as well as DVD sources.