How much HD space is needed for captures?

[Executioner]

Sorry to ask this dumb question, but I could not find an answer searching threads and the FAQ's on capturing.

I'm going to get a capture card to copy some of my VHS tapes and convert them to a VCD. After reading several FAQ's and fourm threads, they all mention a lot of HD space is required, but did not give an amount. I currently have a dedicated 17 gig HD with nothing on it except for encoding movies from DvD's.

Would this amount (~17 gigs) be enough HD space for captures from VHS to MPEG-1?

[drewson99]

decide what bitrate you will cap at, take a 1 minute sample, then take the total bytes used and divide the 17GB by that. That is how many minutes you can cap.

Andy

[markums2k]

It depends on a few factors and settings. A quick and dirty answer would be: 10 gigs = 1 hour of video. So: 17 gigs = almost 2 hours of video. Results may very. Consult a physician.

If anything, you should be able to fit a lot more than 2 hours of video to the HD. It will all depend on the bitrate (as mentioned), the resolution, etc. Will the video be compressed or uncompressed? The ratio above is generally for uncompressed video, which is recommended if you plan on editting the video before encoding to MPEG. The idea is, you don't want to remove the video too far from the first generation, and every time you encode the video, you're making it look worse. Just FYI, I guess.

[Executioner]

Thanks for the replies. Sounds like the 17 gig HD is pushing the limits of capture. I guess I'll move to a 40 gig to be sure.

I'm not really sure of the bitrate. I'm pretty good at making VCD's and SVCD's, but wanted to copy some of my VHS tapes over to CD. I just bought a Hauppauge wintv usb caputre card, and plan to experiment with it first before doing a full copy (at least that was recommded by several people in multiple threads). I also made my own stand-a-lone bitrate calculator for making SVCD's when using CQ to help me determine the file size when I do a sample.

I guess it will be uncompressed, because I would want to remove some of the garbage before the movie starts (previews etc). If I make it already compressed, I should be able to simply cut out the beginning of the tape which has all the junk before the movie actually starts using TMPGEnc right?

[markums2k]

Good point. If you simply want to trim the beginning and end of a clip or movie, you can do that in TMPGEnc.

If you actually capture to VCD compliant settings right off the bat, your video won't take up much space at all. However, re-encoding again with TMPGEnc at that point may not be the greatest thing for the quality.

It all depends. I think your own tests will prove to be a lot more useful to you than our random comments.

If you have the time to spare, just go ahead and dive into the project and decide what you need as you go along.

[oldfart13]

Isn't there a limit to the max bitrate with a USB 1.1 device? I know the ADS IDVD is 5 MB/s CBR. That's why I bought an ATI AIW 7500. I can now cap 480*480 9 MB/s VBR Mpeg-2 which I use as my master then rerender using TMPGEnc for either VCD or SVCD. The SNAZZI III USB 2.0 would probably have been a better buy if you want to cap at higher rates though I suspect cost was a factor in your decision. I'm capping old movies and have found that 70 minutes is approx. 5 Gig at the 9 MB/s bitrate. You can then add all the filtering you want in TMPGEnc and other programs and then rerender in S/VCD. The picture should look great then.

[Executioner]

I plan on using MPEG-1 only, and I got a good deal on a used capture card I figured what the hell even if it's USB. All I want to make is a VCD of somewhat equal quality of the original VHS. If I can encode right off the bat to VCD standards, then hopefully this card will work. I'll be using Win2k pro with 328 megs of ram running dual PIII-550MHz cpu's.

[aguillon]

Yes if you manage to get a decent MPEG1 encoder, you ll have very small footprint for the resulting videos (about 650 meg per hour roughly).

However, as outlined earlier by other distinguished members of the forum, unless you buy the more expensive cards (like a Dazzle DVC III for instance), quality will definitely be way inferior to your VHS tapes.

When using an ATI AIW 8500 for instance, quality is rather crappy when using direct MPEG1 capture. Capturing in MPEG2 first, then encoding separately, produces very high quality results in comparison.

Cheers

[RoopeT]

If you want to make an lossless capture using huffuv and a resolution of 720 x 576, you'll need about 500 Mb / min, so for capturing a 4 hour tape you'll need approximately 120 Gb.

[Executioner]

Thanks for the additional replies. I figured that my Hauppauge wintv usb caputre card is probably not that great, but I got it really cheap. My long term goal though is to buy a Dazzle. The Hauppauge card will allow me to experiment with caputring, just like I learned about making VCD's. It took me over 2 months of practices before I finally got the settings right.