Coverting captured avi?

[johnny quest]

I use my xtasy Everything capture card to capture from a Sony 8mm camcorder. I use Virtualdub with Huffy or PicVideo codec. My resulting files are quite large.

I eventually want to convert the avi's to dvd compliant mpeg2's with TmpegEnc but I am concerned about the resulting mpeg2 file size after conversion.

My question is this, using the standard DVD template in TmpegEnc, will my resulting mpeg2 be larger than the captured avi? Also, what kind of quality loss would I be looking at assuming I captured at a high bitrate and a 720X480 resolution?

Thanks in advance?

Also would love to hear from any Xtasy Everything users and the details on what software and settings they use for capturing 8mm.

[housepig]

I don't use the Xtasy Everything, but I do capture at 720x480, Huffyuv codec with iuVCR, and I end up with about 26Gb per hour.

Putting that through TMPGenc, using the 2-pass VBR and 224khz audio, NTSC dvd mpeg settings, I end up with about 2.5 Gb per hour of video, and it looks very close to the original avi.

so no, it's going to be much smaller, and the more time you throw at the conversion, (2 pass vs 1 pass) you should be able to get a really nice result in a small file size.

- housepig

[johnny quest]

Thanks for the response, I haven't used iuVCR. Does it allow you to control the bitrate of the captured avi and have you had problems with dropped frames? I have an xp2000 with 512 ddr and have problems dropping frames in Vdub when capturing at high resolutions like 720X480. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks

[housepig]

I'm not sure, I've never really tried to set bitrate for a capture (I thought that was tied up with what type capture you set - RGB or YUY2).

I do know that iuVCR has more settings than you can shake a stick at, and gives me the best audio synch out of all the stuff I tried using (VirtualVCR, NeoDVD Capture, PowerVCR)... unfortunately Vdub doesn't like my capture card for large frame captures, so I can't use it.

try it - it's shareware, I think it's got a 30 day trial period.

- housepig