help with Ulead videoStudio?

[wamit]

Hi,
not very long ago, I've bought a piece of hardware to capture video from my old VHS cassets.
It came with a nice looking program that is called Ulead VideoStudio. I did some experimenting with it and found out that a minute of captured video takes about 1GB of free space, after using "program compression" I got down to about 300MB for 1 minute video. That's about 30 GB for one movie.
is there any add-on that might help me compressing (or encoding or whatever is the right term for that) the videofiles so it wouldn't take that much space? the main problem is that I don't have that Kind of free space on my hard drive - so I need to do the capturing and the compressing simultaniously.

thanks
Amit.

[Chris K]

after using "program compression" I got down to about 300MB for 1 minute video. That's about 30 GB for one movie.
is there any add-on that might help me compressing (or encoding or whatever is the right term for that) the videofiles so it wouldn't take that much space? the main problem is that I don't have that Kind of free space on my hard drive - so I need to do the capturing and the compressing simultaniously.

Does the "program compression" has any options to set a capture format or bitrate?

Inexpensive capture cards don't have any hardware compression build in to capture directly to e.g. mpeg2. They mainly capture to MJPEG or DV avi and then 300MB/minute is normal. The benefit of it is that such avi's can be easily edited but you have to recompress them afterwards. For that you can freely choose almost any encoder and format you wish and have much control over the final quality.

For your system (1Ghz speed, 80GB HD) which is quite minimal, the options would be; 1. Buy a capture card with hardware compression or 2. mount a extra HD to temporarily store and edit your captured MJPEG/DV avi's on. I would prefer the second cause with software recompression you can achive much more quality then most consumer hardware encoders offer.

[Bjs]

Depending on version and pc cpu specs.

Capture > options > video and audio capture capture properties > capture tab (choose required defaults or click "advanced" button).

In advanced options window is video bitrate ... don't use anything below 3500 for full dvd resolution.

Being 1ghz processor you have three choices.

A: Use PICVideo MJPEG as compressor ... worked well when I had a p3 800
B: Buy a capture card with built in hardware compression
C: Upgrade system (motherboard / cpu / ram)

[edDV]

Check for Video Studio version number under "? Help" "About".

Current versions can capture to MPeg or export to MPeg or a variety of other compressed formats.

[wamit]

Thanks guys, MPEG worked great.