Hi all, I have a Sony Handycam DCR-HC30. I am New to all this so I need some help. I captured about 4 minutes of video in avi format and it was like 1.13 gb and and didn't look that great. Am I doing something wrong? I was using ulead video studio 10. If anyone can help or point me to the appropriate beginners guides it would be much appreciated. Thanks, WickedSS
I used usb If that is it right size for 4 minutes how do I get the size down to a more reasonable size or am I stuck with that outrageous size on my videos. I would like decent quality but 1 gig seems excessive for 4 minutes.
Using the USB cable is why you got bad quality. You need to get a firewire cable for your capture. That 1 gig is not excessive. If you want quality captures, you best be investing in a large hard drive, somwhere in the 320GB range, for starters. Capturing as a DV-AVI file is the best you are going to get, but it isn't going to happen through a USB cable. You might want to preview the capture that you did, for dropped frames.
Thanks for the help....but how do they get 2 hours of video on 4 gig dvd? Do I need to compress it or something after I capture it?
If you'r new to this, check this page: http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/basics/tapetodvd.php. Each of the sections contains another link with more detailed info about each of the steps. Anyway, when you put it on DVD, the movie needs to be compresssed to MPEG-2, which takes far less space. You can do the conversion with separate encoding software, but it can als be done by DVD-authoring software (which creates and burns the DVD structure, including menu's etc.). One advise: don't put 2 hour on one 4.7GB DVD. If you do, you will need to compress it very much and you will end up with low quality. A rule of thumb for 4.7GB DVD's; 1 hour is highquality, 1.5 qulity is moderate quality, 2 hours is low quality. For a 2 hour movie on on DVD, go for a double layer DVD.
Thank you guys so much for your help...Still a little confused, but I am gonna check out that link and see if I can get clearer... Thanks again
OK. Sound like you need some basics. Here they are. Video in digital format can be found in various formats and in various compression levels. A simple rule is that the more it is compressed the more quality is lost. On DV tape the video is stored using the a DV codec (codec= compressor/decompressor) and when you transfer it using a Firewire commection to your PC you will end up with an AVI file in which the video is compressed with the DV codec. The compression ratio of the DV code is fixed and is 1:5. One hour of video/audio takes around 13GB. It is high quality. Video stored on DVD is compressed to a format called MPEG-2. This has a much higher compression. It is variable and somewhere between around 1:15 and 1:30. So the quality is less. If you want to get your movie from tape to DVD you will have to convert it from DV-AVI to MPEG-2. On your PC you can do that by using various pieces of software. A stand-alone piece of software like that is called an encoder. Another option is to use so-called DVD authoring software, which is used to create Video-DVD's (create titles, add a menu, maybe even subtitles, different audio tracks etc.) Most of them have a built in encoder so you can import AVI files and they aurtomatically convert to the right format (MPEG-2). Hope this helps.
The industry has millions of dollars of software and hardware that isn't available to the normal consumer. They press their discs, and they aren't 4.7GB discs.
I currently use Magix Movie Edit Pro 12. I started with Pinnacle Studio 8 which was very easy to learn, but didn't do a lot. Movie Edit Pro has a lot of features and only costs $50.00us. Learning curve is a little steep, but well worth it if you stick with it.
