Any limits to file size when capturing DV or MPEG2?

[rayban]

I will be capturing using an ATI AIW 128 Pro for analog from 8mm tapes. Will I have any limit as to the size of the capture? 2G limit or something like that? Also, I wll be using firewire to capture DV from a minidv camcorder using Pinnacle Studio 8 software. Do I have a limit on DV capture or can I capture a 60 min DV tape in one pass? Should I use NTFS or just regular FS on win2k Pro?

Thanks for any help you can give to someone just getting started.

[SaSi]

Some (older) capture programs have a limit of 1 Gb on AVI Files. Most don't.

FAT32 has a limit of 4Gb for any file and if you capture on such a drive, you won't be able to exceed it.

NTFS has a limit of a few Terabytes (TB), well, the size of your disk. So it's the best FS for capturing purposes, but you must have Win2K or WinXP.

If your disks are FAT32 (but have Win2k or XP), you can convert them to NTFS with the command line:

CONVERT {DriveLetter}: /fs:ntfs

The conversion does do a lot of fragmentation, so you should defragment the drive after the conversion is complete. (Watch out, it can take a while on large disks).

[Karate Media]

With NTFS, the disk space allotment is, for all intents and purposes, unlimited; in FAT 32, the file size limit is 4 GB.

One hour of DV is going to be approximately 12GB-ish (estimating off the top of my head -- and that's based on me using an external Dazzle DV-Bridge capturing dv .avi, your mileage may vary), so you would probably prefer sticking with NTFS for capturing.

Visit:
http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm
or just simply http://www.ntfs.com

for better and more knowledgable insight...

[rayban]

Thanks for the response. I have one more question. I will be using 2 hard drives: 1 for my application programs and the other one for just capturing. Should I partition both as NTFS? Since my applications wouln't surpass over 4G of data for a single filesystem and better compatibility with applications out there, should I use fat 32 on this drive? Would I have problems having 2 different fs on 2 different drives on the same machine? Or should I just format both drives as NTFS? I was more worried about application programs not working on NTFS or were these only for certain games?

Please advise.

:P

[Vejita-sama]

Any program that's come out in the last 5 yrs should have no trouble running on NTFS. Most of the problems were with certain games back when NT first came out. I would format both drives to NTFS.

[rayban]

Thanks again! This forum rocks! I'm sure I will have more questions as soon as I start capturing and burning to DVD.

[VideoTechMan]

This is some more info that might help......for each hour of DV capture is about 15GB....so if you have an 80GB hard drive, you have about 5.5 hours of DV footage you can capture. In my system I have 2 80GB drives (one is a 120GB i partitioned 35GB for the system), so roughly 160GB of video storage will equate to about 10 hours of video....more than enough for most video needs, unless you're doing really big major projects. And like the other guys have already said, NTFS is the way to go.

VideoTechMan

[donpedro]

Largest DV AVI file captured with my Pinnacle Studio 8 was little less then 12GB (WinXP,NTFS). So there shouldn't be problem.

Recomendation: Do not capture in MPEG2 if you need to edit your footage.

[tjtoed]

I captured a 90 minute DV tape to AVI without a problem. I have WinXP so NTFS FS and the size was roughly 18 GB.

You should have no problems capturing a 60 minute DV tape to AVI using NTFS FS.

[rayban]

Just curious...how long would it take to capture a 60 minute dv tape?

[tjtoed]

I believe it is real time capture.

So for a 60 minute tape, it would take 60 minutes + processing time after capture was done.

At least that has been my experience capturing via firewire with Windows Movie Maker 2.

[donpedro]

Yes. DV AVI that is 60 min will take 60 min.

[fossilfuse]

I am new to capturing, so why not capture in Mpeg-2 vs. AVI when editing? Which program will edit AVI? Once the AVI is edited, can it be encoded to Mpeg-2 to take up less HD space? Just asking for my own education.