How much space will I need?

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I want to record a TV show to archive to VCD. I'm looking for the best quality within my means. When I'm done I'll need to have recorded 45 min on one hard drive. I have about 16 gig of free space. What format/setting should I capture at? Also, I'll need 1 gig to convert the avi to mpeg.

Suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

Mike

-- Michael S. Gilmore (mgilmore@san.rr.com), March 02, 2000

Answers

You really do not give enough information - 15G's left over is bags but it depends on you capture card and the encoder your going to use.

If your encoder has a 2G input limit like most stand alone do then your 45 minutes will have to be captured at 2048/45/60=0.75M/s no more or the encoder will not handle it. The same data rate will apply if your capture software has a 2G limit otherwise it will stop capturing partway into the TV program. If your capturing half size (dimensions) frames then you have a good chance as long as the upper limit is set to 0.75M/s or 775k/s maximum.

There are a number of other ways of doing it that end up with better quality but you need to be operating the equivalent of AV_IO to achieve it OR a digital camera is another option, record it on a DV camera and process it from full frame captures at 3.6M/s (takes about 9.5G's of storage).

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), March 02, 2000.


I'm new, so sorry if I didn't give enough info. I haven't bought the equipment yet, but I plan to use a Matrox Marvel G400 to do the video capture. The feed will be a DirecTV satellite feed. I'll be recording a TV show with comercials. What I want to do is capture the video to create the best VCD I can given my constraints. Mainly worried about my hard drive space of 15 gigs.

Also, I plan on using the Panasonic encoder. From what I've read I guess I just capture video with the Matrox and encode with Panasonic. Since I haven't used these tools yet, I'm not sure what limitations they have.

Since I have hopefully made clear my intents above, the fact that I intend to archive a TV show to VCD, I would appreciate any pitfalls I may encounter using the tools listed above. Also, I would appreciate any suggestions of better tools in the same price range for the purposes listed.

Sorry for the long post, I just getting started and need help. I'm sure you were once where I'm at now. Have mercy. Leave a post.

Thanks in advance,

-- Michael S. Gilmore (mgilmore@san.rr.com), March 03, 2000.


I have more or less the same things you want to use (Matrox Marvel G200 and Panasonic 2.2) so I guess I can share what I know. Assuming your source is very high quality (such as video from a DV-camcorder, a digital satellite receiver, or DVD set-top), use S-video connection and capture at quarter-res (352x240), with lowest possible MJPEG compression (4:1), and CD-quality audio (44KHz, 16b, stereo). 2Gb of HDD space in this way is about 30mins of video, but not to worry because the G400 will simply create a new file on the fly, such that after capturing with the above parameters for two hours expect to have 3 or 4 *.avi files on your capture HDD. Splurge on a 20Gb UltraDMA33 hard drive (such as a WD expert drive) and DO NOT put anything else on this drive, system files, etc, etc. It should be formatted as ONE WHOLE partition and reserved SOLELY for the captured files. In this way there are no dropped frames at all. With a little calculation you will find you can capture straight for more than 4 hours on such a drive. After capturing you open Panasonic and specify these captured files. Because they were from high-quality sources, NO noise reduction is necessary, other than the half-pixel interpolation. Choose NTSC/PAL VCD template. A little thing here: NTSC does best on GOP of 15,3 while PAL on 12,3. Panasonic also has a nasty habit of decreasing color saturation on the resultant MPEG files so during capture (with the PC-VCD app of that G400, for example) increase color saturation about 15%. I find that approaches the end of the scale anyway so I just put color saturation to maximum. Do batch encoding then go to sleep. With hardware assisted Matrox MJPEG-coded AVI and Panasonic's encoder the superb results, bar none, are there for all to see.

-- EMartinez (epmartinez@yahoo.com), March 04, 2000.

EMartinez,

Thanks for the great post. I'm curious though, the Matrox Marvel G400 TV encodes it's files into a propietary MJPEG format. How do you get your files into *.AVI format? Does this degrate the quality from the original capture? Sorry for my ignorance.

Thanks for your help,

-- Michael S. Gilmore (mgilmore@san.rr.com), March 04, 2000.


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