Hi All, I have tried a myriad of things for trying to capture and archive footage I have shot. I have a Sony mini dv camera, and either Windows or Mac OS (depending on whatever will work better). I have a few questions for you experts! 1) Here is a best practices question. If I wanted to capture my video so its ready to use when I want to edit it should I capture and make it large and uncompressed, or smaller and more manageable and compressed? 2) What is what is the best way to just get it off my camera and make it so I can either make a DVD of it, or start editing it? 3) I have a video that I took (60mins), and I just wanted to make a DVD of it. I captured it using Vegas, put together a timeline with all of the clips, made an AVI (15GB!), then I compressed it using Divx...the problem now is that I can't give it to anyone that isn't using DIVX! What is the best way to fix this issue? So in this case, storing a bunch of 15G videos doesn't sound efficient (which is one reason I asked question 1) I have been looking around the forums here, and have been largely overwhelmed by all of the different ways to do things. I want to learn from you guys and gals. If you can just point me in the right direction....I'll do the digging. Thanks!
1.If you want the best video, capture as DV-AVI. It will be a large uncompressed file, but it will give you the best video, and it will edit a lot faster than trying to edit an mpeg file. 2. To capture as a DV-AVI file, you need to connect the video camera, to your computer, via a firewire cable. This applies to miniDV tape video cameras, only. 3. I can't help you on the DIVX stuff, because I have never compressed to a DIVX file.
Thanks. So that confirms I am doing the right thing in at least capturing in AVI. Now I just need to figure out how to keep the decent quality of mini DV, but still be able to put it on a DVD. Is there some sort of software which allows you to take it directly from Mini-DV to DVD? I guess if you did that, it would have to somehow compress it to be able to fit what would be 15gigs or so onto either 4 or 8.
Size of the file isn't totally the issue. You can figure that you will get approximately 1 hour of video, on a standard 4.7 GB DVD, at high quality. There are software programs that support burning directly from the miniDV, to a DVD. I don't use them. My Roxio program has what is called "Plug and Burn" to do that. I have used it only once, and it worked fine, but the chances of getting it to work every time is hit and miss.
