1 minute = 230 MB??

[timmus]

I started offloading video from my DV camera (Sony TRV-730) via Firewire and WinDV, and I notice that all filesizes are coming out to be about 230 MB/min.

OK, so MPEG2 is a raw, bloated stream, but this chart
http://stream.uen.org/medsol/digvid/html/D7_howmuchfit.html
doesn't show anything in the realm of 230 MB for 60 seconds.

- Should I be getting a better filesize with WinDV?
- Would something besides WinDV will give smaller MPEG2 files?

[ZippyP.]

I notice that all filesizes are coming out to be about 230 MB/min.

Windv transfers from your camera as DV and not mpeg, if I'm not mistaken. Coincidentally DV is about 200 MB/min.

[jimmalenko]

DV is roughly 13.2GB per hour, which equates to about 225MB per minute by my calculations, so yes, that file-size is about right. And it's not MPEG-2 with WinDV, it's DV-AVI


EDIT:

what zippy said ...

[timmus]

OK, that explains it. I'll have to search this forum and figure out if WinDV is really the best thing for capturing.

[gadgetguy]

WinDV is an excellent program for transferring from your video camera. Go to the WinDV website and view the interactive screen to learn about the settings. Especially the discontinuity threshold and Max avi size settings.

Edit: just re-read your post and I mis-understood. DV-AVI is the format that all programs will transfer the video from your video camera, but some programs will encode to mpeg2 on the fly without saving the interem DV data. Encoding on the fly tends to produce poorer results than encoding seperately. Also, if you intend to edit your video it is best to do that in DV-AVI before encoding. Mpeg2 is a "end product" format that doesn't edit well.

[redwudz]

What ZippyP. said. DV is ~13GB/hour. Nothing you can do about that. It doesn't matter which program you use for transfer. WinDV is one of the best. DV is a form of AVI. It is very easy to edit compared to MPEG-2. I use VirtualDub Mod with Type 2 DV and the Panasonic DV Codec. VDMod is a good simple editor. You can use Type I with the newest version of VD.

If you really want MPEG from a DV stream, you can use Mainconcept encoder to convert on the fly. Some other programs can do this also. You will likely have to enable the buffer in MC. Not the best of quality, though and a lot harder to edit the MPEG-2 after-wards.

I prefer to frameserve the edits and filtering from VD to TMPGEnc encoder. This gives you good quality and lots of options with no intermediate video file to take up HD space.

For quick and easy DivxToDVD can handle the DV file once it's on your computer and convert it to MPEG-2. More or less a one step method. Not the quality of using the separate tools, though. There is still a freeware version of it in 'Tools'.

EDIT: Darn! I took so long to type this that everybody got there before me. All good advice, though.