Need advice on DV options

[mallen]

I am new to all this DV technology. I have read all the forums and articles and came up with a few notes about what requirements and specifications I should consider before I record some video.

1. What size drives do you recommend? I know I need a second drive and have heard there are some size specs. and speed to consider.

2. Is a separate box better than and internal PCI card? Is it easier on the processor?

3.Can you explain the AVI technology? I have read about going straight from AVI to DVD.

4. Whats the pros/cons of software encoders and Hardware encoders?

5.Is it true there are some DVD discs that will be phased out like the Beta tape was? I think DVD-R is better? Is that true? Becuase I need to buy a DVD recorder too.

Ok I think thats all my questions for now.

[mallen]

Ok I know I asked alot of questions but I thought it would be better to keep it all in one thread.

[Thorn]

I'm too tired to be detailed, so here's the half-assed answer:

Assuming you go with a firewire card, you're not really capturing. You transfer the DV to your hard drive, which doesn't take a lot of CPU.

DV takes 13GB per hour of video. If you want to capture that all at once, you need a bit more than that and you need NTFS rather than FAT for your filesystem (FAT limits you to 4GB chunks). You want extra space for encoding and then building the DVD. You could probably get away with less than 20GB for editing an hour's worth, but I prefer to have more so I don't have to delete everything from the last step before I can continue.

You don't really need a second drive if your first one is big, but it certainly helps to have the extra space to work with, and having one drive just slows things down.

If you decided to go with an external box, someone else will have to help you. It will cost a lot more, but if you want ease-of-use and are willing to pay for it, there are a lot of hardware/software packages that make it a shorter process to make a DVD.

As for the DVD format war, it's all a load of crap and you can ignore it. Neither + nor - will be phased out any sooner than the DVD format itself is obsolete. If you need one over the other to ensure it plays in your DVD player, then that's something to make a choice over.

Umm, yea, this is too much to cover in one thread. You'll actually find all these answers spread out over other threads so start reading. You'll get better advice when you focus on one specific question in a thread.

[mallen]

Well I spent two days reading and searching the forums and the articles. Made some notes and that's what I came up with. I figured if I posted 5 times none of them would get answered.

[Thorn]

Your questions cover the topics of a couple of the discussion boards. A lot of these things are discussed heavily, since a lot is based on opinion. You don't want 5 heated discussions in your thread.

FYI you'll spend a lot more than two days to figure out all of your equipment and software. If you've only spent two days, there's still a boatload of good information for you in old threads. A lot of people are too lazy to use it, but the more you search, the more you learn how to mine good information out of it. Many people do this as a hobby, and spend a lot of time learning.