Darek,
forgot to mention this but part of the problem is the that if you have 120
GB on the hard drive you need to back up 120 GB and that isn't a small
amount. In the end it costs more than people expect.
Below is the answer to another question, but it is my standard dissertation
on some issues with editing video:
What is your end goal? Are you creating DVDs for your own use on your PC,
to send to friends and family to play on their Windows PCs or standalone
DVD?
Do you want to burn (as in flames) the VHS/DV tapes when you are done?
DV format is currently the highest quality/most universal format but it is
13 gigabytes per hour. So you will have to become a very good editor /
censor if you want to save your footage in top quality. My wife is a great
editor,
she routinely and ruthlessly chops 1 hour DVs into 3-4 minutes.
Saving finished projects to WMV or MPEG-2 would allow fairly good quality
and you save more video. But since these are compressed formats they really
are only good for finished products. So if you don't want to have to
recapture your video from the
camera each time you want to create a new compilation, you will need to buy
a lot of hard drive space to keep the original high quality video readily
accessible. To make a real "Hollywood" DVD the video eventually has to be
converted to MPEG-2.
As an aside, WMV can have astounding quality, better than DVD. Check out
this demo:
http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...ce_trailer.exe
It is an self extracting zip exe, so that people would not try to play it
from a server. I re-encoded that clip 10 times to the same format and it
still looked good.
If you start with great input and encode it using high resolutions then a
compressed format can be used, by amateurs, for editing as long as you limit
the number of times you do it.
Back on topic:
I'm capturing everything to a DV camera and then I capture from the DV
camera to the PC through firewire in DV-AVI format. Some DV cameras (Canon
at a low price)
will also convert analog into Firewire without capturing to tape.
I am keeping all my original captures on my hard drive. I currently have
about 170 GB devoted to video.
I set up four folders:
Capture - raw capture, DV-AVI
Events - raw capture split up into short events, DV-AVI
Edited - events cleaned up, DV-AVI
Presentation - Edited video converted into WMV for sharing with other
computers
If you want to do things methodically and you have many old tapes it will be
a while until you can make a DVD so you would stay in DV-AVI format for at
least a couple of months.
I delete the stuff in Capture and Events as I am done with it and I erase my
DV-AVI tapes for reuse.
I back all this up to a 250 GB external hard drive. You can also backup all
or some of this, depending on which work you are willing to lose to DV-AVI
tape or DVD-RW.
I am waiting for the day when a good format shows up so that I can convert
the Edited video and then delete it also. The jury is still out about
whether WMV, or MPEG-4 will be a good long-term editable format (there will
be some quality loss, but for amateur purposes this is okay).
I have tried saving to "High Quality Video (NTSC)" in Movie Maker II and
that may be the format I am looking for, but I'm not ready to commit yet.
Any way, sorry for not answering your question directly but I wanted you to
consider some of the other issues.
More directly, my favorite capture device is a DV camera with analog inputs,
it is more expensive than a card but it has many uses. I don't see direct
capture through a card buying anything but trouble, and you won't have the
DV tape as a backup. You will have to recapture again if something goes
wrong on the PC. DV is a worldwide standard.
To remain in DV-AVI or WMV and to share video with other Windows users,
Windows Movie Maker II is great. For help see built in Help, Help Topics;
website
www.papajohn.org; newsgroup microsoft.public.windowsxp.moviemaker.
To create DVDs that can be played in stand-alone DVD players there are many
products. This is a good low end product that has worked for me. You can at
least try this and then move on from there.
Ulead DVD Movie Factory 2,
http://www.ulead.com/dmf/runme.htm, a free trial
is available
Similar Threads
