I am using Nero to "capture" video that I have shot with my Mini-DV camcorder. I have hours of video on my hard drive now but I have no time to edit it. I want to move this captured video footage off of my hard drive to free up space because it is almost full. I want to be able to put this footage back on the hard drive to edit in the future. What is the best way to do this? I want to be able to keep freeing up the Mini-DV tapes that I have and reusing them. Should I do something different to store this raw data besides "capturing" it?
what if the captured file on my hard drive is larger than the capacity of the dvd? Is there a way to break that file into smaller pieces?
Hello. If you have Nero, you probably have Nero BackItUp. You can select the folder that has the raw video files in it and choose your DVD burner as the output device and allow Nero to burn to the disks. You'd also have to use the same program to restore the backed up files of course. I haven't used it myself so I can't vouch for it. Almost all backup software should be able to do it as well. I use Norton Ghost for backups. I wouldn't allow the backup program to do any file compression however.
I am capturing the whole 90 min tape. When I was using the usb port and a program called Pixela it would capture them as .mpg and they would be about 2.5Gig - but now using firewire and Nero the are .avi files and are about 15Gig for the 90 minutes.
A 90 minute video shouldn't be 15GB, especially if it's an AVI. One of the settings must be wrong somewhere. Check the bit rate. I've never used the Nero capture function so I won't be of much help for that.
For what it is worth, I recently converted all my VHS video tapes to DVD. I captured the video with a WinFast2000XP in mpeg format and then burned using Nero. Each 3 hour video fitted onto a standard DVD5
laddyboy - you said I was doing some searching to try and find out what I am doing wrong that would cause my .avi files to be so large and I came across the site http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/basics/transfer.php that states that: [bold]"Storing video on a hard drive takes a lot of space. The exact amount depends on the compression format and ratio, but standard DV-AVI for example takes about 2GB for 9 minutes."[/bold] So given that 2GB takes up 9 minutes then wouldn't 10 times the video (or 90 minutes, as I am capturing) take up 10 times the hard drive space (or 20GB)? I am in no way doubting your knowledge - I am just a newbie trying to pull his head out of his hindquarters.
I agree with laddyboy because, as I said in my above post I have been through the process, 9 x 3hour Video tapes to 9 DVD5.
That's probably correct for raw uncompressed video. Most of us are used to dealing with somewhat compressed video I guess. We usually think about 4GB per hour or less as a general rule. There should be a way to have Nero compress it somewhat as it's captured to reduce the file size.
Uncompressed D-AVI takes up huge amounts of space. Most people don't keep it in that format very long, simply because it takes up too much space. Some options would be: 1. Compress it down, store it, then edit it later. The only problem with this is that compressing and re-compressing video degrades the quality slightly. If you do it right, the degradation might not be noticeable. 2. Store it as is, then edit it later. This would keep the video in perfect quality until you have a chance to edit it, but the files might not even fit on DVDs. 3. Buy more Mini-DV tapes, so you can just keep the video in perfect quality on the tapes until you have the time to capture and edit the video.
