Best program to capture off of DVR and have file be somewhat small!!!

[Dom_Sisko]

I was wondering what the best program is to get files off of my DVR. I have a Pyro A/V Link box to connect the DVR to my computer.
The problem is that I first used Adobe Premiere Pro 7.0. It worked great but when I finished and exported the file it was 4.5 GB. I then tryed to use it to compress it and instead it made the quality much much much worse. So I want to know either what I can use to get the show off of my DVR on to my computer and have the same quality as the avi files of tv shows I download (they are preatty good) that is going to be around 350mb or smaller. Or if I should keep using Adobe Premiere and then use a different program to change the file. Please any help would be great!!
Thanks
Dom_Sisko

[guns1inger]

You need to study the files you have aquired elsewhere, specifically look at th eresolution and bitrates used in these files. You will find that both are fairly low.

Something like AutoGK would be a good place to start. Transfer using WinDV or Premiere (which ever works for you) as DV avi (I assume that is what the Pyro does), then use AutoGK to convert to xvid at the appropriate resolution and bitrate.

If quality matters at all, then you don't want to compress as you capture.

[Dom_Sisko]

Ok How would I go about finding the resolution and the bit rate of the files?

[guns1inger]

avicodec, g-spot, and little time spent searching and reading the guides and posts in these fprums . . . . . .

[FulciLives]

The Pyro A/V link will convert analog video to the DV AVI format. This format uses compression but still creates very large files ... as you have found out. Generally speaking one hour of DV AVI will be about 13GB in size.

So yes you need a lot of HDD space but the good news is ... once the capture is done there are a vareity of ways to then compress this DV AVI into a smaller size while retaining quality.

The AVI files you said you have downloaded are most likely MPEG-4 ... probably XviD or DivX formats (both are essentially MPEG-4).

The benefit of MPEG-4 is that you can get what is considered a small file size yet still retain quality. At least if you know what you are doing 8)

However before you decide to use a MPEG-4 format let me suggest on NOT using it. Allow me to explain.

The XivD and DivX format say they can handle interlaced video but they really don't do this correctly. The standard thing to do is to make the video progressive first (if not already) when converting it to a MPEG-4 video format. However since these are analog captures we are talking interlaced video and making that progressive can be a very tricky thing. Sometimes you can convert interlaced video to progressive in a "good" way (known as IVTC) but most times it gets converted to progressive video through a process called deinterlacing and this is generally speaking "bad". Doing a proper IVTC is very tricky and some interlaced video sources cannot be converted that way meaning they get deinterlaced.

The better option is to convert your DV AVI captures to MPEG-2 DVD spec video and burn a DVD Video disc because this way you can leave the video interlaced and not have any quality issues as a result.

Now you are probably wondering at this point ... how come those MPEG-4 AVI files I downloaded look so good? Well the truth is most of that stuff comes from HDTV video feeds and stay 100% digital from reception to capture to MPEG-4 conversion and the people creating those files generally speaking (knock on wood) know what they are doing and properly convert the video to progressive (if it wasn't already progressive to start with as some HDTV already is).

If you want to try going the MPEG-4 route then you would be best to try autoGK as already mentioned.

However as I said you would be better off with MPEG-2 DVD spec encoding and there are many guies here on how to do that ... the two most popular programs being TMPGEnc Plus and CCE.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Dom_Sisko]

Thanks alot both work great!!!
Thanks for the help!