dv file size

[resnullius]

hi i'm going to try and edit from a minidv cam (sony trv17). but i don't have much space on my hard drive right now( about 7gig) i'm wondering if that's big enough to have about an hours worth of dv i'm not worried after compression it's while i'm working in premiere that worries me... is the dv file kept on the camera till it's saved and compressed? Any pointer will help thx

[PhArAoH]

An hour of DV video captured/tranferred from miniDV camcorder will take about 14GB of Hard Disk space. You have 7GB available so that's half an hour, but don't forget that you need extra space for editing, compressing and for Windows to run properly (at least 200MB for windows only).

If you want to edit the video with Premiere I am afraid there is nothing much you can do apart from buying a larger Hard Disk. And you have to tranfer the whole video from your camcorder before you can edit it in Premiere. The only alternative is to capture the video with a real-time software/hardware encoder in which case one hour of video will take about 600MB of your Hard Disk space. Keep in mind that real-time software encoders do not give a good quality video as opposed to off-line encoders. I have tried Cyberlink PowerVCRII and was very disappointed. But, at the end of the day that's a choice you're going to have to make.

I hope this will help you.

[resnullius]

Are you saying it isn't possible to get the first half and then do the second half with premiere? and you said it's not possible with premiere, is there an other software that can?

[EricB]

Premiere is a great DV editor, but really fair to poor with mpeg (IMO). You can edit the DV in chunks, probably not 1/2 at a time but maybe 1/3. You would have to compress each chunk to mpeg or whatever, and then join the files.

It is really a lot more seamless to get a larger drive (40G < $100) and edit the whole project in Premiere, then frameserve to TMPGenc.

DV and small drives don't mix!

[resnullius]

actually i do have a good size hard drive it's just rather full right now thx for the info do you know if it can be captured in .mov instead of avi?(I'm a cross platform user)
by the way forgive my ignorance: IMO?

[EricB]

IMO = In My Opinion
IMHO = In My Humble Opinion

I have not used a MAC for DV so I don't know about the MOV question. Certainly all PC is AVI