Capturing to a small resolution -little reference window-

[eddu]

Hi all,

Great forum!!

First i must say i am quite newbie to video so...

Is there a way to capture from DV to a, for example, 160x120? I have to make a multimedia dvd-rom wich should contain from 8 to 16 hours of video, but size and quality doesnt really matter much. I want to avoid a step in capturing-converting, so that i only do capturing.

Also is there a way to know which size is going to be the captured AVI (depending on the resolution i choose)?, and can i capture directly to a 160x120 compressed format (i think i read something about cpaturing to MPEG-2, that should be ok)?

Thanks guys! Keep it up!

[redwudz]

DV isn't captured, just transferred. The framesize is preset by the device that is downloading it, in most cases a DV camcorder. You can use a program like Mainconcept encoder and it can encode it on the fly to the format or size you want, but it takes a fairly fast computer.

I would convert the DV after you have it on your hard drive to the desired format.

If you need MPEG, then you may have a problem. You could encode to MPEG-1 as it is fairly compact. But 8 to 16 hours is asking a lot from even MPEG-1 and no way would that work with MPEG-2.

I would take a 5 minute representative clip of your DV and try some different encoder settings. TMPGEnc may be one of the easier ones to play with. Then you may be able to estimate how much room the finished file will take up. There is also no guarantee that a DVD player will play such a file.

EDIT: You are asking about a DV AVI file, as from a camcorder, not just a general AVI type of video?

[eddu]

Yes, i am asking about a DV AVI.

I forgot to say that 8-16 hour is the total amount of time. Probably i have 8 or 16 one hour pieces of video.

What specs do you mean by "a fairly fast computer" to encode in realtime?

I think its a bit waste of time (and disk space)to do both processes, if i can do it all at once. I have a P4 2.8 1gRAM...enoguh to encode on the fly?

Thanks again.