video taking up hard drive memory

I'm converting old analog into digital onto my computer. The 160 GB hard drive is quickly filling up before I have a chance to even sort through the clips/collections and make movies. Should I start moving some onto DVD disks? How much will a disk hold? Can I view what's on those disks without having to import them to the hard drive (thus taking up space), and then only import what I'm ready for?

A DVD holds just about 4.45gb of data.... however a standard uncompressed
AVI file on your hard drive takes up approximately 12gb of data per hour of
footage.... your third party burning software takes up to 24gb, re-encodes
it and burns the DVD in VOB, IFO and BUP files.

Rather than work in GB which can be confusing, tell yourself that your
finished AVI's can be just under two hours in length.

If you wish to compress them, you can import in WMV format, which will take
up less room, however will decrease resolution considerably.
--
Cari
MS-MVP Windows Technologies - Printing/Imaging/Hardware
www.coribright.com

"Mike B" <MikeB@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:BC263236-7646-444A-B740-3287061A66AA@microsoft.com...
> I'm converting old analog into digital onto my computer. The 160 GB hard
> drive is quickly filling up before I have a chance to even sort through
> the clips/collections and make movies. Should I start moving some onto
> DVD disks? How much will a disk hold? Can I view what's on those disks
> without having to import them to the hard drive (thus taking up space),
> and then only import what I'm ready for?

The only solution I've found is to first get a good idea of what finished movies I want from the old footage. This is the most important step because it helps organize things. Then take my old footage, edit out all the junk (the older the footage the more junk it seems), built a movie from the edited footage, and write it back to DV tape. These movies are organized based on step 1. I don't try to make the movies in step 1 at this time, I just want to organize the material so I can get it later when I'm making the real movie. I want to stay in DV AVI format because this is the best format to edit with.

You can save your video as mpg on DVs but mpgs are hard to edit.

Once I have the various DV tapes, I can then make the real movie by recapturing the new tapes. Because much of the junk is gone, I find I can deal with all the footage. And because of step 1, I have a good idea of where I want to go.

A solution I'd really like to implement, but cost is too high, is to get some of the big 200 gig external hard drives that are available and capture everything to them. But unless you take step 1 to organize things, you are likely to end up with a bunch of full hard drives and still not know where the clip you want is.
Les
www.video.ncsparks.com
"Cari (MS-MVP)" wrote:

> A DVD holds just about 4.45gb of data.... however a standard uncompressed
> AVI file on your hard drive takes up approximately 12gb of data per hour of
> footage.... your third party burning software takes up to 24gb, re-encodes
> it and burns the DVD in VOB, IFO and BUP files.
>
> Rather than work in GB which can be confusing, tell yourself that your
> finished AVI's can be just under two hours in length.
>
> If you wish to compress them, you can import in WMV format, which will take
> up less room, however will decrease resolution considerably.
> --
> Cari
> MS-MVP Windows Technologies - Printing/Imaging/Hardware
> www.coribright.com
>
> "Mike B" <MikeB@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:BC263236-7646-444A-B740-3287061A66AA@microsoft.com...
> > I'm converting old analog into digital onto my computer. The 160 GB hard
> > drive is quickly filling up before I have a chance to even sort through
> > the clips/collections and make movies. Should I start moving some onto
> > DVD disks? How much will a disk hold? Can I view what's on those disks
> > without having to import them to the hard drive (thus taking up space),
> > and then only import what I'm ready for?
>
>
>