Controlling DV capture resolution when using firewire

[John Galt]

I am proof that a true newbie can successfully capture DV through his firewire card and burn a VCD without ever posting a question. Thanks to all of you who populated the HOW TO section of vcdhelp.com .

I am now attempting to use the analog pass through, or capture capabilities of my digital camcorder to convert my old 8mm videos to VCD. I am restricted by the 20GB capacity of my second drive, and have been unsuccessful in controlling the capture resolution of premier 6.0, DVIO, sclive, Edit Studio, and a few others. Is it possible to change the capture resolution of these or other tools if you are using a firewire card for capturing?

[kitty]

Typically firewire caps at the max miniDV size & rate. Thus the bandwidth of firewire is more than the video8 you are capturing - no real way to say "smaller please".

You'll have to use traditional capture cards to adjust size - maybe a bt8x8 chip board or direct to MPEG2 in hardware with something like the Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250. That is the card I'm using for my older video8 footage.

[EricB]

John,

As Kitty has already indicated, the conversion happens in your camera so there is no way to change that resolution. With limited disk space, you could try ULEAD MovieFactory2 or VideoStudio6 which can do a live conversion of the DV video to mpeg1 or mpeg2. On a fast system, this can do a remarkable job.

[ktnwin]

Dumb suggestion but simply work:
why don't you just go get a 60GB or bigger hard drive.? They are so cheap now. This is better than getting an analog capture card and then have to resolve all kinds of issue.

If you decide to go with a capture card , try to get the one with hardware MPEG conversion. This saves hell lot of time for making VCD.

[donpedro]

In Pinnacle Studio 8 capture settings I have these options:

1. DV = full quality, no custom options

2. MPEG = DVD, SVCD, VCD templates + Custom settings

3. Preview = custom settings, custom codec

Now... I never tryed any other option than DV. So no experience there.

Preview mode has different purpose (capture low resolution from cam.; edit; when you are done it will capture only scenes needed in your final video = less space needed on your HD) but I guess, since you can select any codec and any resolution .... Hmm... maybe it can be used for what you need... Maybe...

[LanceSteel]

I am now attempting to use the analog pass through, or capture capabilities of my digital camcorder to convert my old 8mm videos to VCD. I am restricted by the 20GB capacity of my second drive, and have been unsuccessful in controlling the capture resolution of...

I tried fooling around with changing the reslution on the fly and found it to be a dead end. I agree with ktnwin. If I were you I whould buy a larger HD, capture at full DV resolution and then resize it after it is captured to whatever you want.

[ktnwin]

Another point I forgot to mention. DV captured via Firewire is fixed at 720x480 (for NTSC) resulting in about 13GB/hour of movie. The captured file is DV AVI file. Not much we can do about it.
The advantage of larger HDD will come in handy for editing and rendering DV movies too. If you don't have enough room on the HDD, you may not even be able to render transition, titles, etc...