Capturing more than an hour to create a DVD

[micetrap]

Okay folks, I need some advice...
I have a Canopus ADVC firewire capture device and I am using Vegas Video to capture. I am able to capture about an hour... sometimes an hour and 10 minutes of either the VHS tapes I am trying to convert, but that's it. After an hour or so, I get a ton of dropped frames or the file would be too big to burn onto a dvd. I even tried using Sonic MyDVD, that came with my Sony DVD-r drive. It acts like everything is perfect and "captures" all of the video, but when I end the capturing, it crashes. I have a 200 gig drive with 170 gigs free, and my computer has a Pent 3 2.26 gigahertz cpu and 1 gig of memory.
I am trying to convert concert tapes and documentaries to DVD and most of them are 90-120 minutes. Can someone please tell me how I can do this where it will still be able to be burned to a DVD?

[housepig]

I would try a different capture app - I use iuVCR and VirtualVCR with no problems, lots of people use VirtualDub.

how is your drive set up? I never capture to the same drive the OS is on, I have 2 separate physical drives for capture. I wonder if that's part of the problem as well...

[vhelp]

hi micetrap..

You might want to try those apps that housepig mentioned, but you might
also want to look into DVIO too. I use this app w/ my ADVC-100.

I can't see why you are getting cut-off, but maybe it has to do something
with your VHS tapes age/condition/health. Maybe even your VCR.

I use a JVC S-VHS w/ S-Video outputs to my ADVC-100's S-Video output.
To date, I've never encountered any issues as you laid out above.

Good luck,
-vhelp

[micetrap]

Thanks for the tip. Today, I was able capture a 95 minute VHS tape using Vegas Video. It created a 20 gig avi file and now I am converting it to an mpeg2 file for making a DVD. I have been converting for over 5 hours now and it's at 75%. EEEK! I am hoping that the final size it's too large as it's already at 3.3 gigabytes.

[ZenZen]

Micetrap
Do a search in the Tools section (left side of screen) for Video Bitrate Calculators. With this tool you calculate the playing time of the movie
(in your case 95 mins) and it will work out an encoding bitrate to make
it fit exactly onto a DVD blank. You don't have to encode at the top DVD rate (8000 to 9000 bps) and in fact, with the quality of most VHS tapes, you will get away with 4000 bps (anything higher is wasted). With a lower bitrate you will obviously fit more playing time on a single DVD, typically 2 to 3 hours.
Also, for the best capture software to use with the ADVC-100
(I have one check out www.scenalyzer.com
With this capture program you never see a dropped frame.

[mkelley]

ZenZen is right -- good advice.

In addition, you might want to consider a better encoder. Both CCE and MainConcept do at least as good a job at encoding in terms of quality as TMPGEnc, but they are faster by orders of magnitude. Typically they encode in real time (i.e. 90 minutes in 90 minutes) and if you have a lot of these to do that can add up (although you can obviously let your computer encode overnight if disk space is your biggest issue -- for less than $100 you can get 120GB so there's no real excuse not to have enough disk space).

I typically capture 10 to 12 hours of stuff on Saturday and then encode overnight to burn the next day. This has enabled me to get pretty close to my goal of finishing all my MSTies (also all on VHS, and also all around 90 minutes when edited).