newbie question on dvd burning pc setup

[myfogin]

I am running XP and have 2 HD's (20 & 40GB) both are FAT32 and I'm hoping someone can tell me if this will be OK or will I need and NTSF partition ?

Thanks

[rhuala2]

I am running XP and have 2 HD's (20 & 40GB) both are FAT32 and I'm hoping someone can tell me if this will be OK or will I need and NTSF partition ?

OK for what exactly? DVD copying, capturing then DVD authoring...

For DVD copying (backing up) I would say you will probably need about 15GB per movie. It really depends on the movie size, if the movie is 1 layer you can iso write it to your hd and u only need 4.3gb. Yet if its huge, say Lord of Rings, and u want perfect quality then the rip alone is about 9GB I think... then u would split it into 2 directories, so that another 9GB. So for that movie 20GB would be safe. Of course once you've burned it you delete it all. So I would say that 15-20GB per movie would be fine, but in reality I have about 40GB and can do 3 movies at a time (various sizes). hope that made sense.

As for FAT32 vs NTSF, FAT32 won't hold a file over 4GB, so if your doing high bitrate captures or raw .avi captures then I would stay away from FAT32, but for DVD copying, you can split the files and the main .vob files on the DVD are usually not over 1GB. So for DVD copying I would say FAT32 is fine but for Video capture I would go to NTSF.

Hope that helped a bit...

rhuala