Capturing taking up too much hd space?

[apollo1980]

Hi all.

I have a 120 gb hd and I am capturing using huffyuv codec and virtualdub. My hard drive is filling up, so I bought a cheap 20 gb hard drive to use for capturing video only.

I fill up that 20 gb hard drive with just over 30 minutes of video. 720x480 is my resolution.

I read the faq for virtualdub, but it looks different from what I've seen from before.

Am I missing some setting? Why is that hard drive filling up so fast? I realize uncompressed video takes up a lot of hard drive space, but just over 30 minutes fills up a 20 gb hard drive?

Please advise.

[tito13kfm]

um.. yeah.. that's about right.. just under 20 gig for about 30 minutes..

Just wait till you start to screw around with HDTV captures.. o man.. the pain.. the agony.. 1920xsome other ungodly high number uncompressed is REALLY REALLY BIG.

Try using PicVideo MJPEG codec and set it to like an 18 quality, should be about 1/4 of the size if I remember correctly.

[pijetro]

First of all, don't be surprised. Huffy is the next best thing to totally uncompressed video. Look at the ratio while capping in Vdub. It's usually 2.0:1.

If it's filespace you're looking to save, and still wanna use Huffy, then I'd suggest capturing at 352x480..

Mini DV is about 13-15gig an hour, but that requires hardware that converts it (ie camcorder, capture card)..

[apollo1980]

Hi all. Thanks for replying. Yeah, I was grabbing on my 120gb hard drive when I had more space than I knew what to do with it, and never stoppled to look at the massive size these files were.

I tried grabbing at 352x240, but I noticed when I tried to play back the file with windows media player (Windows XP) it looked squashed, while 720 x 480 looked presentable. Am I missing something?

[pijetro]

Read carefully. Capture at 352x480. This is a legal DVD resolution, and as far as quality goes, should satisfy the VCR conditions..

[apollo1980]

Opps, sorry, that's a typo on my part. I did actually mean 352x480. With that resolution, it still looks squashed.

Any other ideas?

[FulciLives]

As someone else noted you might want to try an MJPEG codec such as the one made by PICVideo. However I would try using the 19 quality setting whereas the other person said to try 18 ... generally anything after the 19 setting is considered less quality than you really want. The highest setting in PICVideo MJPEG is 20 but most seem to use 19 (as I do).

Anyways the whole point to using PICVideo MJPEG is that at the 19 quality setting you get a very good picture BUT it takes up way less HDD space than using HuffyUV.

Second if you capture at 352x480 it will look squeezed DEPENDING on the media player you play it back on. Some will restore it (stretch it out) to standard size (full screen which will be 720x480 or 704x480) but WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER will play it at 352x480 making it look squeezed.

When you encode this for DVD you will be encoding it at 352x480 but your stand alone DVD player or any DVD media playback software will play it back at full screen (aka 720x480 or 704x480).

So once you use a DVD Authoring program and burn it to DVD it will look fine.

Please note that 720x480 or 704x480 will look a bit sharper than 352x480 but this really should not be noticeable on a standard TV unless you TV is very large (like 60" plus) otherwise 352x480 should look fine. Another nice thing about using 352x480 is that it hits the MAX bitrate at around 5000kbps so if you are a quality freak this is a plus.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman