I have a dual AMD 2.0 GHz pc (200 MHz FSB) 1 gig ram creative labs soundblaster live (pci) scsi dvd rom sony 710a dual layer dvd burner (using atapi to scsi adapter) scsi ultra 160 70 gig hdd agp nvidia GeForce 4800 se with svideo/composite in & out I am wanting to take some old tapes and move them to dual layer dvds with no quality loss. I do not currently have the disk space to bring an entire movie to the hard drive uncompressed first (i have close to 50 gig free). I'm hoping there is a program that could take the video as it comes in and burn it, while deleting the part that is already burned to make space for the part that isnt. I think that is just wishful thinking though. Proviced that my wish is not possible, I need a program or programs that will compress the video to 8.5 gig (dual layer size.. duu) on the fly and put them back out to dvd with as little quality loss as possible. BTW, what kind of space would an uncompressed 90 minute movie take up on a hard drive? Any advice is appreciated. Darrell
hi, if "no quality loss" is essential here then i think you are out of luck. there may be a program that can do what you are asking (i've never seen one) but the quality would certainly be sub-par, if not plain crap. your first option would be to simply get another hard drive, captureing to a dedicated hard drive is ideal for maintaining quality. it looks like you perfer scsi but honestly a second 80 or 120 Gbyte IDE drive for $60 to $80 will do the trick. then you can use all the good software tools to get the job done right, instead of just half-assed. alternativly, you could use what you already have, but capture in a compressed format, as in, directly to mpeg2. this would save all kinds of hard drive space but the quality may turn out to be less then desired... hope that helps, have a good one...
Hey, thanks for the reply! I did some reading on the HuffyUV codec. It seems with it that I would have sufficient disk space. Will the rendered AVI be an appropriate format to burn to dvd, or will I have to change it to another format? If needing to be changed, any program recommendations? One last question. Any particular program I should use to burn the final file to dvd? Darrell
indeed the huffyuv codec is the best compromise between quality and compression, in fact, the quality is lossless. however, while the compression is good compared to other codecs or formats, you have to bet on a compression ratio of about 600MB per min. for a 90 min capture that would be 54 Gigs, and that does not include space to encode the file to mpeg2 for authoring or burning. the 50 gigs of space you have is not enough to capture lossless video... one thing you might want to try is captureing to DV AVI format. usually people can't capture to this format cuz their computer is not fast enough, but i think you might get away with it. capturing DV AVI diretly from an analog source is not lossless but is very close, so the quality is still very high (much better then capturing to mpeg2). the real advantage is that DV AVI is also highly compressed. 90 mins of tape may only take up 20 gigs, leaving you enough room to do the encoding and what not. Cinema Craft Encoder, TMPGEnc 3.0, and Mainconcept Mpeg Encoder are excelent mpeg2 encoders. the Mainconcept encoder also comes with a nice little analog capture tool that i have used to capture directly to DV AVI and have had great results.
