ok, when I was shopping for a camcorder most everyone here recommended a minidv for picture quality. Well what is the point if when you capture the video to your PC the quality drops off anyway? I am a little frustrated by this. Help please?
.AVI files are uncompressed files, and the loss you get, when you capture to your computer, is minimal. To capture as an .AVI file, to your computer, you need to do it via a firewire connection between your video camera and your computer. And don't buy a cheap firewire cable. Buy cheap, buy twice.
Hook up the camera to the pc. Load up WMM. Select import video. Capture from video camera. Drag scenes to bottom and be sure to save as AVI not WMV.
so as long as I do what you guys are saying I should have some nice video to use to put to DVD? What about some system requirements? What size HD should I be using? How much memory? How about processor speed? Is there anything I missed?
You should get the largest hard drive that you can afford, since .avi files are huge. As for system requirements, check the minimum requirements of the software that you will use to edit the .avi files, and get a system that FAR exceeds those minimum requirements. A good video card is a must.
Ok... here is what I am currently using. AMD Athlon 2600+ (running at 1.9) 1gig pc2700 Asus A7N8x motherboard 128ddr geforce video card 40gig hard drive. does this sound good? These videos are for personal use. I am not doing any high end things. Just home videos. I am not going to store them on my hard drive either. I will be transferring them to DVD
A 40GB HDD will not be enough if you want to rip from a mini DV camera. Using WMM I currently get avi files that are about 13GB an hour, then you would need space to save it once the project is finished as well... I currently have about 400GB of unedited avi's at the moment, just trying to find time to convert them all to DVD.
If I do one video at a time and I am working with ones that are like 15 mins long at most will that make it easier? Also I have a 2nd 40gig hd with nothing on it I could dedicate to this. Would that work for me? Also what about my other specs? PS. Thanks for all the advice / help
I need to correct these statements. AVI itself is actually not a format but just a definition of the container that can contain all kinds of video and audio, either compressed or uncompressed. Video on miniDV is alos not uncompressed. It is compressed using the DV-codec which has a compression ratio of around 1:5. And if you use a Firewire connection and tranfer to DV-AVI the qulity loss will not be minimal, but zero because it is actually a bit for bit transfer. You can do it with a 40Gb hard drive: it can contain around 3 hours of DV-AVI video, but once you're getting a bit deeper into video editing you will soon find yourself being busy with managing storage capacity in stead of editing video. I recommend to get at least an 80GB hard drive or larger. They aren't that expensive anymore and it will save you a lot of frustration. Having a separate hard drive for your videos is also a very good idea, because you will have less chance of dropped frames during transfer and having your videofiles on another disk as your video editing software will improve your working speed. About your other specs: they look OK to me.
