need advice on camcorder capture compression

[Millwood]

I have a sony dcr-hc26 which is a low resolution mini-DV camcorder.

The sony capture software produces humongous uncompressed files.

I've tried using VisualStudio capture but don't know what compression to choose.

DivX got into trouble with sync. Microsoft MPEG4 triggers a VS bug when I try do jog around in a file - VS loops.

Whats the best choice to preserve what I'm getting from the camera at reasonable file size.

(Search didn't find and answer).

[BrianCee]

Please read these two posts in full - which will assist you in all the stages of succesfully capturing your video and acheiving an acceptable finished video.

http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=18318

http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=13421

If you want high quality video pictures then you must be prepared to accept relatively large file sizes - 1 hour of good quality video should produce a file of about 13Gb

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[DVDDoug]

Right! You have a MiniDV camera which stores video in DV format. ...This is a good thing!

When you "capture" (transfer) the video to your hard drive it normally gets written to a DV-AVI file. This takes 13GB per hour of video. The actual DV data is not altered. It is just re-packaged from the tape format to a hard disc format. (An "AVI" file can also contain more-compressed formats.)

If your goal is to create a DivX disc/file, you should have no trouble if you do all of your editing in DV-AVI, and then convert the file to DivX after you are all done with everything else.

The same is true if you are making a DVD. Convert it to MPEG-2 as the last step before burning.

All of the MPEG variations use lossy compression.* So, it's best to compress the video one time. Any "real editing" (crossfades, cropping, transitions) will require the MPEG to be de-coded and re-coded. This 2nd encoding takes time, and it requires another lossy encode step.

The same is true when you convert from one lossy compression format to another (i.e. from MPEG-2 to DivX, or vice versa). With each encode step, some quality is lost.

In addition to the theoretical quality loss, Video editing programs often have strange problems (i.e. "lip-sync" problems or crashing) when editing or converting these highly-compressed formats. The more compressed formats such as DivX, Xvid, and the other MPEG-4 variations seem to cause the most trouble. But, I've sometimes even had trouble with MPEG-2 (the DVD format).

Some files will work fine, and some users never have problems with their particular DivX/MPEG-4 files. But, if you search the forum for "DivX", you will find lots of people having problems. There are many variations of each video format, as well as quality-variations. These highly-compressed formats seem prone to corruption of the MPEG data-structure. A corrupt file will often play OK, but cause trouble whtn you try to edit or convert it.



* DV is lossy too. But, it is much less compressed, and less lossy

[Millwood]

I guess I made the right decision in ordering that 500gig drive to add to my system

For now, the video in question isn't that important, so I'm ripping it again in MPEG-2 and I hope it will work. Sigh.

My son warned me that although Ulead was maybe the best of the bunch, all the commercial video software is junk. It sure is!

[heinz-oz]

Especially if you don't know what you are doing and what is involved.

Once you get your big drive, capture to DV-AVI and edit to your hearts content. When done, render to the compression codec you prefer and can play.

There are some excellent tutorials on this board. Can't do any harm to look at them every now and then

[Black Lab]

My son warned me that although Ulead was maybe the best of the bunch, all the commercial video software is junk. It sure is!

I've been using VS since v6 (2002?). I'm not a very patient person. Believe me, if it was junk I would have taken up another hobby long ago.

IMHO, VideoStudio is a very stable, very capable, consumer-grade editing program. Some people have to figure out work-arounds for their own hardware/software configs, and some people just can't get it to work, but I think that's just the nature of the beast (i.e. the same problems exist with Pinnacle, Avid, etc.)

As Brian has advised, read the tutorials fully and give it a try. If you still have problems give us a shout. We'll try to help, just like others did when we were starting out.

[BrianCee]

For now, the video in question isn't that important, so I'm ripping it again in MPEG-2 and I hope it will work.

WHY ?? when what you have already been told in this thread and in the tutorials is to capture (transfer/rip) as .AVI

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