Holy Cow! 2hrs of video=26gigs!

[enutz]

I captured 2 hrs of old trailers from VHS as an avi file and it was 26gigs, I then searched the forums(very helpful)used gspot, the bitrate calculator & super to encode to mpeg2, came out with 4.5gig everything looks fine except at the very begining its like a strobe effect for the 1st minute. I used ffmpeg on super but checked marked direct show(should I have?) Is this a problem with the settings, progams or source?

[edDV]

I captured 2 hrs of old trailers from VHS as an avi file and it was 26gigs, I then searched the forums(very helpful)used gspot, the bitrate calculator & super to encode to mpeg2, came out with 4.5gig everything looks fine except at the very begining its like a strobe effect for the 1st minute. I used ffmpeg on super but checked marked direct show(should I have?) Is this a problem with the settings, progams or source?

How did you capture this? 26GB sounds about right for 2 hours of DV fromat.

[enutz]

I use Windows Movie Maker and have my VCR running through my camecorder thats hooked up to firewire

[SLK001]

You might want to try VirtualDub or VirtualVCR with a HUFFYUV codec installed. It can reduce the size of your files quite a bit (up to a factor of ~2.5 times).

As for your strobe effect, you're going to have to do some experimenting on your own - you have a lot of steps in your process. Once you have identified the offending step, post that info and maybe you could get a solution.

[solarfox]

If you're capturing from a camcorder via firewire, then yes, your AVI files are being saved using the DV codec.

Which is actually what you want to do for the initial capture, because DV is a reasonably clean, low-loss format (not quite lossless, but "close enough" for most purposes) that's desiged to allow for lossless frame-accurate editing. The large file size is due to the fact that in DV, every frame is an I-frame (i.e. the entire frame is stored complete) -- think of it as a file containing thousands of individual JPEG images all strung together, any one of which can be accessed independantly of the rest.

MPEG, on the other hand, only has about one I-frame in fifteen, on the average, with the rest of the stream consisting of B and P frames that only encode the differences between one frame and the next. (It's actually a lot more complex than that, but no need to delve into the hairy details. ) The advantage is much smaller files -- the disadvantage is that you can no longer do lossless, frame-accurate editing.

[enutz]

If I'm doing no editing to the captured video can I caputure it as an mpeg(do any free programs let you do that? WMM doesn't give me that option its crappy WMV or giant AVI) or is it better the way I'm doing it, harddrive space is not a problem it just takes forever in super but I could live with it if its the best way.

[jimmalenko]

Check out NeoDVD. It's not free, but has a 30 day fully functional trial and is not bad at all for quick n dirty caps and it will author for you on the fly.

[Cornucopia]

If I'm doing no editing to the captured video can I caputure it as an mpeg(do any free programs let you do that? WMM doesn't give me that option its crappy WMV or giant AVI) or is it better the way I'm doing it, harddrive space is not a problem it just takes forever in super but I could live with it if its the best way.

There are other options, but I guarantee that if quality is important to you, you DON'T WANT them. Go with Huge AVI (via DV/Firewire capture). Then edit, then export/save/convert/compress/encode to MPEG2 at highest quality that you can get for your program length given the available space on your final disc (SL4.37 or DL7.95GB-or split it).

Again, if quality is important to you (which I think it probably is or you wouldn't have complained about "strobing"), don't go with 1-clik-wonder apps, get the tool that works best for each step in the chain.

You can save some intermediate work's time and space by using programs that FRAMESERVE, but this isn't the easiest thing for newbies.

Scott