When capturing a 40-50 minute file in the avi format i have to drop the bit rate to around 650 kbs so that i do not exceed the two gig limit. As i am trying to make high quality home movie VCD's this limit is rather irritating. Does anyone know of a solution that can help?

-- ric cianchetta (riccardo@cianchetta.freeserve.co.uk), March 17, 2000

Answers

Use AVI_IO. You can then capture your entire video as a few 2-GB files at one go. Convert the individual 2 gig files to vcd mpegs and join them together using iFilm Edit.

Alternatively, capture to mpeg in real time if you have a really good mpeg hardware encoder.

-- Daniel Lee (siangneng@hotmail.com), March 17, 2000.

VirtualDub can now capture in chunks as well.

-- John Vickers (johnvick@ihug.co.nz), March 19, 2000.

ric does not say if its a full frame he is capturing but which ever way he is, you can put those 2G AV_IO avi's (assuming analogue captures, it does not support DV yet) directly into the free bbMPEG encoder and batch encode directly to one mpeg-1 vcd compliant output file at a similar quality to the Panasonic encoder. No need for all the other programs and tricks at all.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), March 20, 2000.

You can create a 4 Gig file with windows 98 & FAT32. There's no file size limitation with Windows 2000

-- bob (bob@yahoo.com), April 27, 2000.

yes but some third party programs still will not accept 4G in computers using w9#, the Panasonic Standalone encoder is just one of them and it has just been updated to support w2000, or so the readme file says, I have not tried to see if the new version will do a 4G file yet, certainly the old one would not. The poor quality LSX V3 standalone encoder will not either in w9# it is limited to 2G.

If your using avi's then you could use Premiere 5.1c and the Panasonic plug for it and then you will have no limit other than 2G on all the files on the time line - a full 74 minutes can then be encoded from source material like DV (74minutes=15762M on the time line) in a w9# computer.

I am currently using the Ulead Media Studio Pro 6 program for DV 1394 firewire source material (4G limit manually and 2G limit in batch mode) and because the quality of the LSX plugin for it is so poor and does not work correctly I am currently forced to encode a CBR all "I" full frame Mpeg2 to feed the stand alone Panasonic encoder, its a pain until Ulead do something about it or Adobe supports type 1 DV 1394 avi's. The new LSX suite plugin for Premiere also provides poor quality outputs when resizing but does actually work correctly and has a very user friendly interface.

There is still no substitute for the bench mark Panasonic, and guess what, Ulead is about to talk turkey with Panasonic for a 3rd party plug because they also now acknowlodge the poor LSX quality when compared to the quality Panasonic provides from the same source material.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), May 03, 2000.

I Heard from lots of folks including my brother inlaw that window NT solved that problem.

-- Laurence Gordo (larryg300@cs.com), December 23, 2000.