Video Capture problems

I am trying to capture home videos (Hi8 and VHS) to my computer and I finally got one of them to work properly. However, I saved the footage in .AVI format and it takes up a LOT of space (1.5 GB for one minute of footage.) I have tried capturing in 740 x 480 resolution in the MPG2 format and but the footage is very jerky (there seems to be a lot of frames dropping out.) Is there anyway I can compress the AVI files so it doesn't take up nearly as much space?

Were you trying to capture and encode to MPEG2 in one go? If so you may want to capture to uncompressed AVI and then encode it.

Using MPEG4 (DiVX basically) instead of MPEG2 will make a smaller file but it will be slower at encoding.

- Trevor

What kind of setup do you have? On my old machine (500MHz, AIW Radeon (the origirnal)), I couldn't do more than half that resolution without dropping frames left and right, and the higher the compression, the more dropped frames. Now I'm sure i could do more, but I only upgraded the computer, not the video card.

He has an athalon 1 gig, 256 meg ram. and the card being used to do the capture is an all in wonder 128.

Hmm, that All In Wonder is before the Radeon brand came out, isn't it? I had the 64MB version and was very disapointed. I think his computer is fine, but I'd suggest replacing the card.

I've been working on this kind of things for the last two weeks while setting up a streaming video server. For simple compression, the easiest thing to use is Windows Media Encoder which you can download from microsoft. Video encoding is the one thing other than games that makes people buy the latest-and-greatest processor, and it's the one thing the P4's impossibly-long pipeline works well on. If you're only doing the occasional family video, speed probably isn't too important however.

Matthew

I tried downloading it, but I am confused on exactly how to use it.....it seems that you need an MS-DOS prompt.....

Hmmm, you ended up with one of the betas that are meant to plugged into a different version. Try downloading the 7.1 encoder, or the 9 series release candidate.

Matthew

No, I think he didn't download the encoder, but possibly the codec, or the command line utility.

Get this one. I've used it for quite some time and it produces very good file sizes/quality ratios. Just be aware that to compress AVI's of the size you're talking about, even with your processor, is going to take quite some time. You'd best leave it on overnight.