Too bid size of my MPEG files captured through IEEE1394 card

[avaishnavi]

I have a SONY DCR PC101E Digital Camcorder. Also, I have a IEEE 1394 FireWire Card. I tried to capture Video from the camcorder to the PC using PIXELA s/w (supplied along with SONY camcorder). The s/w allows me to capture MPEG format file. However the size of the capture is very huge. About 40MB for 1 min MPEG.

My question is :
1) Why is the size so huge? This way I cant capture more than 15-20 mins of MPEG on VCD. (My aim to create VCD).
Can i reduce the file size during capture or later. I would like to have about 70-80 mins of capture per VCD.

2) How can i find whether the capture i did was MPEG 1 or MPEG 2? Though I think i did MPEG 1.

Would appreciate help on this?

Br

ajay

[bugster]

My advice would be to capture in DV AVI format for best quality. This is basically a copy of the data from your DV tape to your PC. This is quite latge though, about 13Gig for 1 hour. However, once you have this you can the transcode to whatever format you want. For VCD I would suggest use Tmpgenc and the supplied VCD template.
VCD is 10mb for 1 min so you can get 80 mins of movie on an 80 min CD.

Hope this helps.

[avaishnavi]

Thanks for reply. However if i try to capture DV AVI, the audio captured is distorted and contains lots of noise. What can be wrong with it.

[bugster]

Thanks for reply. However if i try to capture DV AVI, the audio captured is distorted and contains lots of noise. What can be wrong with it.

Is it distorted in the avi or only after transcoding to mpeg?

1st, check your camera settings. My Pc100 has 2 settings for audio. One is 32khz, the other 48khz. If yours is set to 32khz and you convert to VCD then it will be upsampled to 44.1. Maybe the upsampling routine is doing a very good job, some don't. You can extract the audio and upsample speratley using ssrc.exe This is a command line tool available from the tools section (I think, google if not). I believe there is also a GUI available for it somewhere. It might help.

[avaishnavi]

The AVI captured has audio distorted.

How can i capture AVI with good audio. Do i need to make any settings?