Notes About a Capture Session

I'm collecting facts for my books and website...and thought I'd share some
notes with you. Not many know that capturing from a digital camcorder into a
WMV file is actually a two step process.

While capturing a 40 minute segment of video from my digital camcorder last
night, I opted to go directly to a 2.1 Mbps WMV file and watch MM2's
automatic two step process.

I have the choice of letting MM2 do both steps automatically, or I can
control each of the steps by capturing to DV-AVI first and then converting
the file. The 2 steps are:

1 - capture the video coming in from the camcorder to a temporary DV-AVI
file
2 - convert the DV-AVI file to a WMV file and discard the temporary DV-AVI
one

When you tell MM2 to make the WMV file from the incoming video tape, it
takes care of both steps in the background..... the session went fine and
here's a copy of my notes:

- a 40 minute DV-AVI file would be over 8 GB and I didn't want the higher
quality that comes with the big file size. I wanted a 2.1 kbps file of 495
MB, only about 7 percent of the size of a DV-AVI file.

- the capture from the camcorder itself is in real time, so it's a 40 minute
task to get a DV-AVI file... but it's a bit longer to get it as a WMV file
as MM2 captures to a temporary DV-AVI file first, and then uses whatever
energy the computer can spare during the capture to convert the temporary
file to the final WMV one.... so a capture to WMV format is actually making
two files at once, and it needs more time to finish.

- half way through, at the 20 minute mark, the temporary DV-AVI file was
1.56 GB and the WMV file was up to 152+ MB.

- at 30 minutes, the DV-AVI file was 2.52 GB and the WMV 264+ MB

- at the end of the camcorder capture phase, the 40 minute point, the
temporary DV-AVI file was 3.48 GB and the WMV file 328+ MB, 2/3 of the way
toward it's final size. So it had enough spare energy during the DV-AVI
capture process to render 2/3 of the WMV file.....

- the CPU was still chugging along at 100% as the rest of the WMV file was
rendered from the temporary. That took another 28 minutes and during that
period the WMV file moved up to its final size of 495 MB, but the temporary
DV-AVI file stayed at its peak size of 3.48 GB.... it didn't go down as the
data was added to the WMV file.

- when the CPU stopped chugging along and the WMV file stopped growing, I
pressed the Finish button in MM2 to get it into my collection. I hadn't
selected scene detection so it came in as a single clip. Lot's of stuff
continued to happen in the background, and I wasn't using the computer for
other purposes... it took another 9 minutes from pressing the Finish button
until the clip appeared in my collection and everything was ready to go
again.

- pressing the Finish button was the cue that Movie Maker 2 used to delete
the big temporary file.

My laptop is 2.4 Ghz... if I had a slower computer, it's possible that the
combined total of the temporary DV-AVI file and the WMV file being rendered
from it could exceed the size of a DV-AVI file from the camcorder.... so it
might be using less space in the long run, but not necessarily in the short
run.... if my laptop were quicker, the size of the temporary file might
peak at a lower size.

I usually opt to take care of the two steps myself.... capture into a DV-AVI
file first, make the WMV file from it, and then delete the DV-AVI file. But
this time I wanted to make some notes as it went along.
--
PapaJohn

Movie Maker 2 - www.papajohn.org
Photo Story 2 - www.photostory.papajohn.org

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