AVI Files

[MovieFreak]

I am sure this question has been asked many times.

I have some MiniDV Camcorder home movie footage I would like to record to VCD. I will shortly be purchasing some software to allow me to encode directly to MPEG1 from the source.
However, at the moment, I am limited to recording from the source into .AVI format.

The only problem is, the AVI file is HUGE. A 1 min clip totals approx 200MB. This would make a 60 minute home recording into an unmanageable size.

I read of people converting AVI files to MPEG1. My question is, how big do your AVI files get??!! A 5 min clip for me would be 1 GigaByte and 60 mins would produce a 12GB file!

Not really a big deal coz of the MPEG software I'll be getting soon, but I'm just curious. What are the AVI capturing techniques you guys use?? I guess people converting from AVI to MPEG must have huge hard disks.

[Cam Corder]

I do this all the time and the results are great and fun. I can compress 2 gigs (? about 20minutes of video) to about 50-100megs (going from memory), but it really depends on your setting. The software I use is TMPGenc to convert AVI to MPEG-1. Note, TMPGenc is free and downloadable so you don't have to wait!!!

The conversion to MPEG-1 takes a while though.

[Cam Corder]

I do this all the time and the results are great and fun. I can compress 2 gigs (? about 20minutes of video) to about 50-100megs (going from memory), but it really depends on your setting. The software I use is TMPGenc to convert AVI to MPEG-1. Note, TMPGenc is free and downloadable so you don't have to wait!!!

The conversion to MPEG-1 takes a while though.

[Zak0]

Yeah, I use TMPGEnc to encode my captured AVI files as well. I capture using VirtualDub with Huffyuv compression - 30 minutes takes up like 4 gig or so, I think. Cutting/editing the AVI file using VirtualDub usually takes a bunch more disk space. Lastly, I encode to MPEG-1 (VCD) using TMPGEnc and it takes like an hour per 10 minutes of video on my Athlon 800.

If you don't already have a big hard drive, buy one -- they're pretty darned cheap now!

[Cart Wheel]

DV runs at about 3.6 MB/sec. Compared to many capture formats, that is actually quite small. Be glad you're using DV and not an analog capture card with Huffyuv, which can easily require 10 MB/sec at DV resolution.

-Cart
http://www.geocities.com/lukesvideo/index.html

[MovieFreak]

Thanks for the info everyone.

I think my problem lies in my AVI captruing software. I currently use MGI Videowave III. I will try VirtualDub and see how that goes.

Yep, I agree with the comments about TMPGEnc... I think it's a really cool tool!