I have tried to capture a 45 min movie from my DV cam to harddisk. After about 20 min the program (Ulead VideoStudio 4.0 SE Basic) stops, with a message it may have reached the Operating System limit. There is still enough space on the HD however it stops when the avi clip reaches about 2 GB. Since the prog. came with my firewire card it was mentioned that it needs WIN98 SE which I don't have. IS there a file size limit in WIN 98 that does not exist in WIN 98SE?

-- Gerd Winterfeld (gerd_winterfeld@yahoo.de), December 23, 2001

Answers

The 2 GB has to do with the file system (FAT) that came standard with Windows 98 and 95. I doubt that Win 98SE will help you here. You have to run NT, Windows 2000 or XP and install the NTFS file system to not have this problem. There are some workarounds for this though. You might go to www.vcdhelp.com and look. I think if you capture with Virtual Dub, it can itelligently split your video up into 2 GB segments. It's just my opinion, but I think Ulead Video Studio version 4 is terrible. It's the most user unfriendly video program I've ever used, but your opinion may differ. I would suggest using Virtual Dub instead as I think it fixes your problem and it's a much nicer (and free) program.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), December 24, 2001.

It stops 20mins into capturing because it has reached 4GB, which is the biggest filesize capture in ULVS4. You're lucky because in Win98SE with Premiere6, the maximum capture size is 2GB. Since Premiere only captures in DV type2 that comes to about 9mins. If you want to captuee really big get AVI_IO. Better yet throw away that VideoStudio4 and graduate to Premiere6. There is a plug-in for Premiere called AVISynth that can enable you to directly encode with TMPGenc the timeline contents: you see that even with a string of 2GB files totaling up to 3hrs program length it's not a problem.

-- M. Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), December 25, 2001.