hello everyone. i am looking for advice with video capturing, specifically for taking old home videos and capturing them onto a computer. the videos are on 8mm camcorder tapes, beta tapes, and vhs tapes. im playing them thru either the camcorder or beta/vcr player, and hooking the red, white and yellow cables to a converter device which then hooks to the computer thru usb. currently im using a dazzle converter device. it works good, but the software it came with isnt so great. its roxio pinnacle studio 12. i mean its ok, it does everything i need as far as capturing, but the files it makes for the videos are just incredibly too large. i did a 3 hour video the other day and the file came to 20+ gigs! im wondering, is it the software or something else? i know for a video like that, you gotta expect that the file is gonna be a rather large one, but 20 gigs for 3 hours?!?! please tell me that there is another way! a couple things that have come to my mind already are-- maybe its the software, and theres a better one out there? or also, i dont know anything about like formats and compression and all that, so another question i had was maybe im doing it in the wrong format, and thats the reason its so large. it really doesnt matter to me what format i capture them in, because these videos are just going to remain on the computer, im not burning them to dvd or anything. so in a nutshell, im looking for advice on how to capture the videos into files that wont be so large. now i dont know whether that means i need to use different software, format/compression, etc. any help will be greatly appreciated! thanks.
I'm not familiar with Dazzle or Pinnacle, but does the software offer any settings for the capture format (DV or MPEG etc). You may be better posting at the VideoHelp site and it would be helpful if you could include the format that is being used for the capture. http://forum.videohelp.com/
