Captured video = ? hard drive space

[Mark Pulham]

Hi,

Can someone tell me roughly how much hard drive space one hour of captured video takes up? I have about one hundred hours of video that I want to edit.

Thanks,

Mark.

[denoneil]

It depends on the file format you're capturing in. If you want to edit it, the ideal fromat would be AVI. For AVI, one hour equals about 12-13GB. One hour of MPEG is about 2.5GB. Unfortunately MPEG is not good for frame accurate editing without buying a system designed for it (min $1800 or so.)

[Mark Pulham]

Thanks for the info, I can handle that. My next question then would be which format should I use to send edited (through Premiere 6.0) video to a cd-r? I want to be able to play it on the computer and on a standalone DVD player connected to the tv?

Thanks,

Mark.

[musotechy]

Format would be mpeg but you would need a DVD writer (file size) To burn and play on a CD-R the format will eventually be VCD.

I use Ulead Video Studio, load in the file in the correct template and then convert to the desired format.

[Tommyknocker]

Now it gets a little trickier. There are several formats to record to a CD-R. VCD, SVCD, CVD, XVCD, to name a few. You should read the newbie files, and of course, the VCD and SVCD guides located in the upper right hand corner of this page.

And since you are planning on playing them on your DVD, you should also look up your DVD in the DVD Players compatibilty data on the right as well, to make sure your player likes playing CD-Rs

[SatStorm]

Also, you have to check out for the avi codex.
3 are the most common: Huffyuv, excellent but need disc space, Mjpeg (like picvideo), excellent and fast, but not the best solution to use with some encoders (like tmpgenc for exampl) and DiVX. The last one, need powerfull CPU and higher bitrates to make a source good enough for re-encoding. Let say a CBR bitrate like 2400 for example. Lower bitrates gonna look wonderfoul on our eyes, but like a hell to the encoders!

Other alternatives are the XviD codec (like DiVX and for PAL better, because it supports interlace but have the same limitations as DiVX) and the Asus Avi codec, which looks like the PicVIDEO one, but it is much better for TMPGenc (IMO).

There also other codex outthere, I don't remember now, some of them really good ones!

[Thorn]

[quote="denoneil"]It depends on the file format you're capturing in. If you want to edit it, the ideal fromat would be AVI. For AVI, one hour equals about 12-13GB. ...[quote]

Just a note: 12-13GB sounds like the size when capturing using the DV codec. That IS a slightly lossy codec so I personally don't capture analog video to it (only video that comes direct from my DV cam). Huffyuv is lossless and takes 30GB per hour at 720x480 (capture size affects how much HD space and CPU need: if you capture at a lower res, you save a lot of HD space but sacrifice some quality).

To rehash what has been said, the best bet is to capture to avi using the codec that best fits your needs, edit it as an avi, then encode to mpeg in whatever format you choose. If you only have a cd burner, your choices are VCD and SVCD (and cVCD but that's another topic). If you have a DVD burner, you can also author to DVD as well. Plenty of guides around here on these topics, and you can search the forums to see where others had problems.