Newbie, first post. Could do with some advice please!

[Tee]

OK, I'm not too technically minded so bear with me.

I'm trying to convert a couple of hundred hours of music videos into digital format.

Currently have a copy of Adobe Premiere 6.5 (with no instructions) and a Canopus ADVC 100 to capture the footage.

Have worked out how to capture and have around an hour of footage on my computer in AVI and now run out of memory.

What I need to do is find out how to compress (?) the footage and then save it on disc (as a VCD?), so that I can compile all the footage I want to keep, then go back to the saved footage and clean it up/add titles etc.

Hope that's easy enough to understand (even though it's quite convoluted!). Have spent over a week looking at sites/forums trying to find info. but it's like a needle in a haystack, and I've got to give the ADVC 100 back in 3 weeks, so times running out!!

If anyone's got any hints/links/advice/instructions that would help it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time.

[housepig]

check at left, the Convert and Author sections, plenty of info how to get your source materials into the proper format for VCD, SVCD, whatever.

You need to give us some more information - you ran out of memory, or you ran out of hard drive space? How much ram have you got? how much hard drive space have you got? What format are you capturing to? etc.

Currently have a copy of Adobe Premiere 6.5 (with no instructions)

if you have a legitimate install of Premiere, it will have a manual or a help file.

[Gazorgan]

Capture to digital format is way too vague. Which format? VCD? SVCD? DVD? DivX/XviD? How you want to play it determines what you encode it to. What's the source? VHS?

Personally, I think all you need is VduB and IUVCR. You would need TMPG or CCE if you want an MPEG2 format. Maybe not even Vdub, just depends on the source quality and how much filtering is required(or editing of commercials).

Adobe Premiere 6.5 is overkill for simple digitalization of music vids (not to mention slow to encode, and has a moderate learning curve).

[Tee]

To answer some of the previous questions-

I only have a CD recorder, so with DVD out of the question, I'm assuming VCD is the best way to go.

I'm running a Sharp with an AMD Athlon 1400 XP Processor, 30 gig hrd drive and 256 meg. And I meant to say run out of hard disk space, sorry, my tech knowledge is v. v. limited! (hence not being able to understand the adobe help tools, which might as well be in Lithuanian )

The source is VHS. I want to get all the footage/videos onto a digital format before I have to hand back the ADVC, so I can then go back and edit these in my own time with Adobe, to add titles, clean them up etc.

As AVI's they are HUGE. Is it best encoding them to MPEG's, once they've been encoded, can I still go back and edit them?

Any help is greatly appreciated. In the meantime, I'll carry on trying to decipher some of the info. to the left. Thanks

[bugster]

Editing mpegs is difficult, if you want to compress the captured DV avi's and save for later editing, you may want to look at divx. This is still avi format but much more compressed than the DV format your capture device provides. There will be a little quality loss because of the extra compression but it will allow you to put say an hours footage (or more) on to a CD (RW?) for editing later. As the other posters have said, look to the guides for help in the 1st instance, the come back and ask sepcific questions when you get stuck.

To be honest, getting 200 hours of VHS into any digital format in 3 weeks is a big task for an expert, never mind a beginner with this stuff so good luck and lets hope we can help.

[tweedledee]

You should use TMPGEnc to convert the AVI to MPEG 1 (vcd) and then delete the AVI to give you more space on the hard drive. If the video footage is of a very good quality then maybe convert to MPEG 2 (svcd).
Have a look at the result and see if you find it acceptable BEFORE deleting.
You can get 13gig down to the size of a cd in MPEG 1