Convert captured TV to which format for storage?

[patmoses]

I just got a Pinnacle PCTV Pro. I have been capturing video as MPEG 2 compression, 6 mbit/sec, at 720X480. An hour long program is near 3 gigabytes. This adds up pretty fast. Is there a way I can convert these to another format and keep most of the quality and lower the size? Would something like Divx or Xvid make the video look bad? Also I would need to after I finish all the captures I want to re-encode them to MPEG2 to edit and burn to a DVD. Is it at all possible to do this and would doing this make my video look worse? If it is possible what formats do you guys suggest.

Thanks,
Pat

[redwudz]

If you plan to watch them on TV, Divx may not be the best choice unless you get a Divx settop player. Why not try capturing to 1/2 DI 352 x 480? Will save some space and the quality should be good enough. It's also DVD compliant. If the quality isn't that important, then VCD. Expirement a little with short clips and see what you think.

[babyboo]

Since it sounds like you are going to capture quite a bit and store them for later editing/authoring/burning, it is a valid concern that you will run out of storage space rather quickly. If you happen to have a bunch of RW disks you could always burn the MPEGs as data files just to get them off of your hard drive. You can then copy them back later on when you are ready to work on them one at a time.

Keep in mind though that editing an MPEG isn't as easy or frame accurate as avi, however, if your editing is limited to removing commercials then that would be fine.

As far as taking your MPEGs and converting to DivX/Xvid to save space prior to processing it wouldn't be the most efficient thing to do. While Divx/Xvid would certainly save you on file space while maintaining fairly decent quality, you would lose that advantage by having to encode each file a second time when it is time to convert them back to MPEG for authoring.

Your best way to go might be as redwudz suggests and capture at 1/2 D1 instead. Much higher resolutions might not yield in a substantial improvement in quality but that is debatable and rather subjective. If you can't offload them on to RW discs temporarily, at least they would have taken up half the space they occupied before.