Recording Movie to Tape

D

David Kuhn

Hello there,

I am quite new to this program but Windows Movie Maker 2.0 seems
better than anything I can buy in the stores.

I made a movie yesterday of my son's 1st birthday party. It was 30
minutes long and had only 2 or three transistions and two beginning
titles and one ending credits. The two transistion used some cute
swipes special effects. It worked great!!! I was even able to record
it back out to my sony DCR-TRV230 recorder. From there to VHS tape.
It was very slow at allowcating disk space and preparing before
actually recording, but it did work very nicely.

Than worked so well that I thought I would do this to all our tape
collection. Well my second project, XMAS 2001, has many more
transitions because the camera was paused or turned off many times.
It plays good on-screen and is only 18 minutes long. When I go to
output it to DV, WM2 states "Please wait while disk space is
allocated...". It never goes past that point. I let it run all last
night. It doesn't lock up, it just never allocates the disk space.

My computer is a P4/2.4GHZ with 256Megs of RAM and a 40 GIG drive and
a 60 gig drive. The 60 gig is only for the video processing; nothing
else. It is HPFS(? - not FAT32) file system. I have virtual memory
paging set from 800megs - 12--megs on C drive. If I save the movie to
hard disk in High Video Quality (Large), per Microsoft's Knowledgebase
artical 814836, the file is 361,174KB in size.

I am thinking that since I only have 256megs of ram this is the
problem. I might be running over to best buy in State College in the
next hour to purchase a 512meg PC2700 memory strip. If this doesn't
work, does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks kindly,

Dave
 
J

John Kelly

Hi there,

I am curious as to why you are using HPFS rather than NTFS...not that it
matters of course.

256MB of ram is very small, especially when you realise that there 405KB of
pixels in one DV-AVI frame and if you multiply that by the colour depth,
well HUGE !!!.

I have not read the KB article you refer to...but DV-AVI video takes at
least 12.5GB per hour. DV-AVI video is the highest quality you can
generally get.

The page file needs to be 1.5 times the size of your RAM anything bigger is
just a waste of space, and an increased overhead on the index that tracks
the virtual memory etc. I know that some have argued you should have this
or that, I sometimes get the feeling that they are selling a car and
proclaiming how big the engine is...but fail to mention how small the fuel
tank is. Virtual memory is simply a very very slow method of storing
temporary data. Your first priority in this area is get as much RAM as your
wife, or bank manager will let you buy. Then fix your virtual memory...I am
presently down to 3/4GB of RAM and am looking around for the best price on
1GB DDR sticks....I ruled out the 2GB sticks when I saw one example of
price...Phew!

With regard to the swap file size...there is a KB article on it, which
would be worth reading. you may end up doing what I have...there are
presently 3 hard drives on my system. One of which is used for storing
things I might want one day in the future...but it also has a swapfile and
because that drive is hardley ever used for anything else, XP uses it as
the primary swap file and consequently it runs that little bit faster.
Don't make the mistake of creating a partition on one of your drives to
achieve this...the recording heads still have to look after the other
partition and as a result it can work against you. (XP thinks its the
fastest drive when in fact it may be the most worked drive)
 
D

David Kuhn

I bough a 512Meg DDR 333 PC2700 stick for $80 at Best Buy with a $20
rebate to come also. That was same price as TigerDirect.COM, if not
better.

Anywho....

The file system is NTFS. In my original message, I goofed but I did
have a (?) after the letters indicating that I did not know what is
really was. I was really just throwing letters together that looked
close - hehehe.

Anyway, now with 770M of RAM the video rendered just fine. Total tape
time was 24 minutes with video and effects. The video I am let render
now as I type (on another computer) is 37 minutes in length. I hope
it goes okay. MM2 created the file space and is now counting down
the time. When I left it downstairs, it had about 130 minutes to go.
Hopefully it will still all go well.

I wonder what the maxumum length of movie anyone has produced with as
little as 770M of ram? Sounds like an auwfull lot to me <grin>.
Virtual memory should allow me to use as little as 256M, but as I
found out this program doesn't work.

Thanks for the information,

Dave
 
D

David Kuhn

As a follow-up, the 37 minute movie with a ton of fade transitions
(our trip to the Hershey Park PA Christmas Lights display on December
22 2001) rendered wonderfully. I must have turned the cam corder on
and off at least a hundred times during the walk through of the park.
I imported the tape and then added the animated countdown movie title
(from the 25meg add-on pack) and my own title It then copied and put
every clip (about 100 of them - well maybe not that many) on the
storyboard. Then between each clip I added the FADE transistion. At
the end of all of that (took about an hour or more to paist in all the
fades) I added the animated "The End" credit from the 25meg add-on
package and then added my own animated credits and "Staring" ending.
In addition during the beginning credits I added a "Juggle Bells" wav
file and added it again at the ending credits. This became a really
big save project, but only 37 minutes in length. It saved to the Sony
DV camera just fine. It took about and an hour and a hald (not 130
minutes), but it worked really nice and the results were great (no
studdering or missing video).

When will my bubble burst and I start hating this program like most of
the others do in this forum?

Dave
 
J

John Kelly

Hi there,

The answer to that is real simple...you will start to hate the program when
you flood your machine with cheap and nasty software, which claims to do
everything under the sun, that requires constant attention and workarounds
because the software programmer(s) could not be bothered to create a safe
and robust program. You will often be told about that software by that
computer geek that lives down the road...he knows how to fix anything on
your computer...he has too...he keeps trying these nasty little programs
out and each time he has to do another restore because his machine has
stopped working again, but he will tell you what a wonderful program it
really is and suggest you try it out yourself !!!

You must know someone like this...NEVER LISTEN TO ANYTHING HE HAS TO SAY
!!!!!!
 
D

David Kuhn

The Movie Maker Creativity package from Microsoft; it's about 25 megs.
I also downloaded several others from Microsoft. The winter fun pack
was very nice with the christmas music.

It is still working! I created a short 15 minute movie earlier
tonight and am now rendering a 30 minute movie of christmas gift
openings at my parents with my brother and sister and wife there in
2001. I didn't even have to edit language out like I will with last
year's christmas video! hehehehe

This is two tape edited now out of many, many more to go, but this
program works really well right now!

Take care,

Dave
 

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