Please help converting from tape to MPEG

[Caine]

First time poster, first time user, hopefully someone can help.

I am trying to take the contents of a 1 hour digital tape and convert it into an mpeg file to put on CD. I thought that a VCD can take 70 minutes or so, but when I capture the tape into MPEG-2 format, 4 minutes turns into nearly 700mb, way too much to fit on the CD and nowhere near an hours viewing. I am using Motion DV from Panasonic at the moment because it came preloaded on my PC, and am capturing direct from the camera using an IEEE 1394 connection. The PC is a PIII 1Gb with 60 Gb Hdisk. Does anyone have any ideas regarding this, is it doing the right thing or is something going wrong somewhere?

Be grateful for any info.

many thanks

Caine

[TeeeRex]

At 700Mbyte for 4 minutes - it's certainly not MPEG2 ! - I would imagine that is a lightly compressed AVI DV format of some description - you can probably play it via media player but its no good for a VCD or DVD.

Basically, you need to covert the said AVI file to MPEG1/MPEG2 depending on if you want VCD or SVCD/DVD. I would suggest you start with running the program through TMPGENC (www.tmpgenc.net) with a VCD template and see what output you get. Then have a look through the guides to start to improve the quality/size etc and basically start to have a play.

Good luck ...