Capture oversize or estimate to fit disk?

[vs95]

Is it better to capture a video oversize and let VS X5 make it fit a disk or try to estimate the size and make sure it's small than max disk size? In prev versions it was better to estimate so it would always fit to avoid any audio sync issues but I hear those problems may be a thing of the past. I've got charts I made over the years for sizes/bitrate etc for different video editing software. They don't seem to all render to the same sizes and the bitrate calculators never seemed to be that accurate.

Thanks

[BrianCee]

It is always best to capture your video at the very best quality you can so always try to do a direct copy from your camcorder to your hard drive - that way if you want to use bits of that video in other projects you know you are starting with the best quality available.

Beside - until you have done the editing and added titles transitions and effects you do not know how big your final video will be and what bitrate to apply.

So do your editing with best quality video and then set the bitrate in the burning module to a value which fits the disc nicely.

[Ken Berry]

If you are talking about a 'fit to disc' function, like DVD Shrink or Nero's Recode, then I am not sure X5 even has that function. Certainly it existed in previous versions, and may do in X5, but I simply don't know as I have not used it since about X2. At that time, the project had to be pretty close to the size of the disc you intended to burn e.g. no more than 5 GB for a 4.3 GB single layer disc. The fit to disc function then more or less worked. But if the the project size was a lot bigger, it usually failed. I found it better to either produce the full, larger size video and then apply either Recode or Shrink to it, or else use the bitrate estimate for the final video output to reduce it so that it would eventually fit on a disc.