How much space for AVI format capture?

[Barnabas]

Hi,

How much space does it usually take for a 2 hour movie captured at 480 x 480 or 640 x 480 in AVI format when using the huffy codec?

[techno_1]

do u want quality or quantity?

here is my expertize, I should not be giving it out but hey, I am happy today:


get yourself a hauppauge WinTV GO PCI (very cheap!)

use these settings:


320*240/352*288
30fps
CD QUALITY PCM WAV
YU12/YV12
NO RECOMPRESSION

and capture.

now, the quality will be EXCELLENT! DVD or NEAR DVD, depending on your source.

the file size will be huge, about 650 per min.

you then take this, encode it to MPEG2 about 2-4 times using TMPGENC then to DIVX fast motion:

75 crisp
6000 bitrate and you will have quality AND quantity.

now, people disagree and say "what aload of crap", people say that re-encoding will LOSE quality, no it won't! I done it over 40 times, and works perfect.

I broke the DIVX world record, 7-8 times, 2nd year running and that is what I used.

[HillJack]

For me, 480x480 29.97fps using HuffYUV at its default settings gets me about 20gb/hour. So for 2 hours, expect around a 40gb file (or total of files if your doing multi-segment).

[dj360]

techno_1:

I am confused about what you have typed here. First of all what do you mean by encode to MPEG-2 2-4 times? And what program are you using to convert that MPEG-2 to DivX fast motion? I am fairly new to this (1-2 months) and I am always experimenting to find the best process to make my 320x240 captures look the best they can. I do have a Hauppauge WinTV GO PCI card and I would like to know your procedure you described. Thanks!!!!!

[Barnabas]

To dj360,

I think he talking about the multi-pass option, with that, the encoder takes much longer to encode, but can do a better job with a lower bitrate as it looks over the picture info more than once.

To HillJack,

Thanks, that's exactly the info I was looking for.

[jp1234]

I capture from TV with huffyuv (lossless compression) at 10-12GB/25 minutes. Then I deinterlace with virtualdub and that spits out a file about 7 GB (after commercial edits ~22 minutes) with huffyuv (rgb->yuv2 slightly lossy conversion).

Don't let the mjpeg codec fool you if you are capturing from TV (I've never tried any other capturing). You final mpeg will look *much* better if you use huffyuv.

I use that file as an input to CCE with 4 passes and the output (SVCD) quality is fantastic (noise filter off in CCE if you have a clean input).

One important thing to remember is to set the first pass (in CCE), to as close a quality as your final output is going to be, otherwise you are looking at captures that are really sub-par. This is true with any multipass encoding.

[dj360]

OIC - Well what I found for great looking DivX movies (I can only cap at 320x240 for now), What I do is cap using huffyuv yuy2 and then I encode to DivX Pro 5.02 2-pass. I also change the color depth to 32bit. I guess that is just a personal preference. I think it brings the picture more to life. I have tried other methods but so far, that has worked the best for me since I can only cap in low-res. I use VirtualDub for capturing, editing and encoding. I also use AVI info if I have to adjust the audio. Sometimes it stretches on me but AVI info does a great job at fixing that problem. I gather if I used this method when I cap at a higher res, say 702x480, my picture should look even better. With my system hi-res is not an option. If you notice, I only have an 800 MHz Celeron Processor and 128 MB SDRAM. What I plan on doing is getting another PC just for making movies. I also do not have a DVD ROM drive so, I am forced to capture my DVDs as well. The system I want will have 2 GHz Pentium-4 processor, 1024 MB DDR RAM, 80 GB hard drive (formatted in NTFS), WindowsXP Pro (I have that now), DVD writer, and I am thinking about getting a better tuner and video graphics card as well. But for now I will just make do.

[The village idiot]

I just finished a 2 hour AVI capture with iuVCR using huffyuv codec at best setting (2:1 compression) and YUY2 color space. It was 27gig with the following settings:

video - 352x480 de-interlaced
audio - 48k sample rate PCM (wave) with stream bit rate of 384

For a comparison I have done 704x480 de-interlaced with the same audio and no compression. The results of that are about 1.8gig per minute, which means I need a much larger hard drive to transfer all those old laserdiscs to DVD.