What format to choose

[kbigelow2000]

-I plan to burn to SVCD (lack dvd writer)
-I am capturing from DV via firewire (I have captured AVI format using WinDV, but am open to suggestions on how to best capture
-I understand I can capture DV format but it requires a lot of hard drive space and processing power. I think SVCD uses a lower quality than the DV I would be capturing. Is there a way to capture at a quality that is more in line w/ the quality (but not lower than) I'll be outputting on SVCD? If so, what kind of capture should I use?
Thanks

[Gazorgan]

You don't have many options with firewire. Capture is misleading, you are copying. You need disk space by the bucket full. Which means you MUST run W2K or XP with NTFS harddrive.

SVCD can have awesome results, research xSVCD.

[MYoung]

Hmm. One option is to just do analog capture. Get a decent analog capture card (I use a MJPEG capture card -- Pinnacle Systems DC10plus) and capture at high quality via s-video. I'm assuming you have your video on MiniDV or similar format and a camcorder. If not, find a way to get your video files on your hard drive via firewire card and "capture" software.

I had this same problem. I had a 9 minute video on DVCam that I edited on a Mac with Final Cut Pro. I wanted to put it on my PC for DVD authoring, but I didn't have firewire inputs on my machine, nor did my OS at the time support firewire (Win98 FE). What I did was chop up my video into pieces on the Mac, burn the pieces to CD-R, then copied them on my PC and string them together using a frame server -- AviSynth. You don't need Win2K or XP and an NTFS partitioned HD. You can string together a bunch of video clips together without having one HUGE video file. You can also make a segmented AVI and have your encoder load the video pieces in sequence as it encodes to VCD/SVCD/DVD/etc. I know TMpgEnc supports that. Right now I'm using Windows ME and a 120GB FAT32 partitioned HD to put together 30 minutes of DVD resolution, uncompressed AVI (37GBs total) on to DVD (to about a 1.3GB Full D1 MPEG2).

I recommend you read up about AviSynth. It's not too difficult to learn and it's a VERY powerful tool.