minidv cassettes into cdr

[forare]

I have recorded about 10 minidv cassettes of home video and captured all as avi and stored on my 120 GB hard disk, now I am running out of disk space and was looking for the best way to burn my avi onto cdr (no dvd yet, coming after 2 months). I am mainly concerned to keep all videos as high quality as possible ater I burn them, for future preview.
Would you recommend to convert to mpegs and burn to cds, I am trying to avoid svcds and vcds because of loss of quality , which is a good software to do the conversion and what file settings do I use ?
My avi files are 640x 480
Thank you

[DaveS]

@forare - you'll get a bunch of answers on this for sizes, bitrates, etc. (on home videos, if you want to save space maybe 352x480 and between 2500 and 4000 bitrate - there are a lot of posts on this if you search). tmpgenc can do your encoding

one suggested approach though if you don't have the burner now is to invest in more tapes to hold you until you get your burner. they can be had for $20-$22 US for 5 tapes...if the $$ for the burner is the issue, perhaps just some tapes will hold you. the reason I say that is you will need a lot of CDRs and it will be a lot of work to make the segments of your videos fit onto CD in any way that would give you the quality you want later

the best quality and to preserve for any 'real' editing later would be to save the avi's on CD, but that would take 16 CD's for each hour of video (approx) w/ a lot of work cutting. if you assume you'd put 4 hours of mpeg onto CDs, it would take approx 4 CD's per hour, still w/ a lot of cutting, etc.

if you have plans to buy a burner, and have any way to swing it, I'd go w/ the more tapes option to hold you over for a while

just one opinion -hope it helps..

[thor300]

How did you get the 640x480 resolution? From a DV cam it would be 720x480, thats what is stored on the tapes. I think DV is around 13 gig for 60 minutes, you couldnt have fitted that into a 120gig harddisk. Did you use a capture program or somwthing? DV should be copied, not captured. If you have changed the vide, then you need to copy the tapes to your harddrive again, use for example DVApp, its free and let you control the cam from the pc.
Except from that i agree with Dave here, store the tapes, there is no other cheap way to keep max quality.

[DaveS]

@thor300 - I had same question on 640x480

@forare - also see https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=221802 for a discussion on tapes

[energy80s]

If you are buying a DVD drive in a couple of months, I would buy another Hard Drive as an interim measure. They are very cheap now for large drives (less than £70 for a 120 gig) and just archive your miniDV recordings onto that. Once you have a DVD burner, transfer your miniDV recordings onto disc and re-use your new HDD.

Just don't **** about with CDR for DV avi files.

[forare]

Ok i got confused in here, what do you mean DV should be copied ?!!! the way i capture video is by using easy dvd creator 6, where i can control my DV cam from the software but i still have to capture every single minute from the tape, for one hour i get about 13 GB avi file. Then i had to go to this small resolution because 720x480 was jerking and my avi did not play anygood maybe because of my cpu(1100Ghz) speed and ram(256) not enough for this large process. Am i doing this right ? and in case i will convert to mpeg with high resolution how to do it ?
thank you all

How did you get the 640x480 resolution? From a DV cam it would be 720x480, thats what is stored on the tapes. I think DV is around 13 gig for 60 minutes, you couldnt have fitted that into a 120gig harddisk. Did you use a capture program or somwthing? DV should be copied, not captured. If you have changed the vide, then you need to copy the tapes to your harddrive again, use for example DVApp, its free and let you control the cam from the pc.
Except from that i agree with Dave here, store the tapes, there is no other cheap way to keep max quality.

[DaveS]

how did you go to the smaller resolution:
- when you first did the capture
- convert to the smaller resolution after capture (e.g. capture in 720x480 then convert it)

the jerkiness was probably only in the playback, and not a problem when capturing - were frames dropping when you captured at 720 x 480?

lastly - do you still have the tapes for the videos that you now have at 640x480 or have they been taped over?

[forare]

Ok there was a mistake my avi is 720X480 29.9 fps frame rate (as shown in easy dvd creator) and so now i still have the original cassettes, is this a good capture resolution or should i start over, and how to make it as small as possible without losing lot of the video quality ?i dont think there will be a need to do any editing in the future so i know i can convert to mpeg but what is the best method to do the conversion ?

Note: i checked file properties in windows media player and it is showing 640x480 resolution so which size is correct i dont know why my files have 2 different properites.

i think 640x480 is the correct size because the window is small
thanks

[DaveS]

@forare - what did you think of the idea of using the tapes as storage until you have a dvd burner avail? cutting up mpegs across CDs would be a lot of work. You could do them as VCDs on the CD's - there are some guides here on the site
(see "all guides" in the frame on the left of the page)

[sitlet]

if you're looking for good quality, keeping it at 720x480 dv avi is the only way to go. anything less than that, the quality is going to get much worse. i wouldnt suggest lowering the resolution to burn to cdr's. the only other way to go is to get a new hard drive. you can get a 160gb or bigger for about 100-150 these days. IMO, thats the best way to do it. i you could use a dvd burner and burn them onto dvds, but you would have to deal with splitting the files, and you would only get about 20 mins on each dvd.