putting a system together??

[aschiftner]

Hi all, I'm a newbie to this board and need help setting up a capturing system. I'll be wanting to convert from VHS to DVD while at the same time cleaning up the video and audio.

I imagine my setup looking something like this:

VCR out to Camcorder out to firewire. (I've been reading good things about Canapus products).

1. How can I tell if my camcorder has "playtrough ability"? Its a JVC Model # GR-SXM527U. It does have an 3 plugs on it. An audio, video and S-video. According to the owners manual they are all outputs. Help.

2. How much hard disc space? I only have 20 gig of hard dics space left on my hard drive. Which in reading the boards I'll need to increase but how much? If I try and capture 2 hours of video thats approximately 26 gig, but what abaout the editing part now? Is that file going to double that.

3. Other comments about my current system. I'm operating a pentium 1.2 ghz, 512 RAM and windows xp. My dvd writer is a Sony DRU-510. Thanks in advance for any and all replies. Later Alan 8)

[Vejita-sama]

1. How can I tell if my camcorder has "playtrough ability"? Its a JVC Model # GR-SXM527U.

Read the manual, look up the specs on JVC's url, call customer support.

2. How much hard disc space? I only have 20 gig of hard dics space left on my hard drive.

That's not going to cut it You need enough HD space to capture, edit, encode and author. Depending on what codec you use to capture you get 10~20MB/s. Huffyuv and DV codecs are the most popular, giving about 2:1 and 5~7:1 compression respectivly.

By a bigger HD. I would recommend at least 80GB with 120GB being a better choice. They are cheap (http://www.pricewatch.com or check local stores).

3. Other comments about my current system. I'm operating a pentium 1.2 ghz, 512 RAM and windows xp. My dvd writer is a Sony DRU-510.

That's fine. The slow part in the whole process is encoding to MPEG2. Encode times are dependant on your processor. At 1.2Ghz, if I had to quess, it's going to take you ~1x source runtime per pass in CCE and ~3x source runtime in TMPGEnc. BUT that's a guess. Your system is fine. It time and HD space are a big concern you can capture directly to MPEG2 and save both (quaility will be slightly reduced).