Help with importing miniDV tape?

Question

It imports at the moment in avi format of 12.2GB per tape.

How can I get this down to something more managable that I can put on a standard 4.7GB DVD-R ????

Obviously, reducing the filesize will reduce the quality too... so I would like the way that reduces the quality the least???

Thanks

Answer 1

hi, it looks like you're going to have to re-encode unless you have a capture device that will work directly to Mpeg etc. You'll find that most of the Mpeg2 settings by default will give you the one hour within the 4.7gb disc. It depends on what you are storing them for and what you will be viewing them on. A well tuned Mpeg encoder using Mpeg2 will give you closer to DV quality than anything else as that's what DVD uses. There are types of mpeg4 encoding that come close too but you need to be able to use the settings to get the best out of them normally. If you're going to just store the video as data for editing and production later it's a shame to encode the whole lot as you want to be able to edit the video in native DV avi format really...because of lots of technical reasons I can't go into here.  However, if you store the avi files on a DVD-R disc if you want to view them in their entirety you'll probably have to copy them back to the hard drive because the DVD drive on your machine will not be able to spin them up well enough. At the end of the day your best bet is an external drive...USB or Firewire etc. They are so cheap now and a 500gb one will store a good bit. It's a lot quicker and easier than encoding and burning to DVD-R. If you buy a standard internal hard drive and a hard drive caddy with a media player built in you will be able to play your files directly to a TV etc too. That's what will make the DVD and eventually Blu-Ray obsolete for home video.

I hope that helps.

Best of luck.

Here's a geeky article that might get you going with understanding Mpeg2. Mpeg4 is a lot different.

http://www.fh-friedberg.de/fachbereiche/...

Answer 2

Get a good editing software that will let you render your movies in different formats.