Capture formats avi vs mpeg?

[trueman]

hello,

I have a winfast tv card that I use to record football shows. I was told to use avi to capture in especially if I am going to do some editing of the clip, but I have found the files are really huge.
My editing consists of either cropping scenes and converting them to shrot wmv files for my website, or cropping out commercials and burning to dvd.
This being the case can I just capture in Mpeg instead?

And if so I have noticed that I can still pick different codecs to use with mpeg? Such as PICVideo, Should I just stick with the mpeg codec?
Also what should I set the following at?

Bitrate?
Video compression mode?
Target Data Rate?

Thanks for the help?

[trueman]

Someone??? Anyone?????

[FulciLives]

The PICVideo MJPEG codec is a great codec. It is not freeware but it is fairly cheap. If you have it set even to the highest setting (meaning the lowest amount of compression) you will still get files that are around 50% smaller than uncompressed AVI.

Another popular codec that is freeware would be the HuffyUV codec. It can also compress by around 50% vs uncompressed AVI.

Some people feel that HuffyUV is the better of the two image quality wise and that way be so but for reasons that are somewhat hard to put into a (few) words I still prefer PICVideo MJPEG myself. In fact you can use PICVideo MJPEG without buying it to see if you like it ... until you buy it you get a BIG watermark across the bottom of the image.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[trueman]

I already have the PICVideo codec and use it when I am capturing as avi.

However would I be better off capturing as mpeg and use the mpeg codec instead of avi due to the simple editing I do. I just seem to have much better file sizes when I capture as avi and havent noticed a difference in quality compared to avi either?

Also if I should use mpeg what should I set the following at.

Bitrate?
Video compression mode?
Target Data Rate?


Thanks

[jagabo]

I already have the PICVideo codec and use it when I am capturing as avi.

However would I be better off capturing as mpeg and use the mpeg codec instead of avi due to the simple editing I do. I just seem to have much better file sizes when I capture as avi and havent noticed a difference in quality compared to avi either?

Realtime MPEG encoding while capturing won't give you as good results as capturing to HuffYUV or MJPEG followed by a 2-pass, high motion search precision, encode later. It may be good enough for your purposes though.

Also if I should use mpeg what should I set the following at.

Bitrate?
Video compression mode?
Target Data Rate?

Use whatever bitrate is needed to fit the desired running time on a DVD but stay within the limit of DVD, <9000 kbps or so.

[yoda313]

https://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=VideoHelp_Bitrate_calculator

Also if I should use mpeg what should I set the following at.

Bitrate?
Video compression mode?
Target Data Rate?

jagabo is right. Use the link above to set the proper bitrate. Assuming your using a single layer recordable dvd set your bitrate accordingly.