Video Capture Questions

[gary]

I've just started capturing my videos to disk using MM2 under Windows XP. I
have a Panasonic PVGS-31 Mini-DV camcorder and with Firewire capabilities on
both the camcorder and my computer. Everything, thus far, has been recorded
with a 4:3 aspect ratio. When capturing the video, I'm essentially
presented with two options--capture the video as WMV (2.1 MBps, 640x480) or
AVI (25 MBps, 720x480).

I've been using the AVI option, since that is giving me the highest quality
capture of what is on the tape. However, as I'm sure all the experienced MM
users are aware of, the AVI files are huge and have already gobbled up about
35GB of disk space with a few more tapes to go. I want to preserve these
copies on disk as 'masters' before I start editing the files.

A few questions:

Is AVI the way to go if I want to preserve these in the highest quality
possible?

It looks like WMV captures at 640x480 while AVI is at 720x480. Is WMV
chopping the video somewhere to get it to 640, or is AVI stretching it to
get to 720?

If I have multiple events on one tape and I use MM to break them out into
individual events/movies, and I save them as DV-AVI, would they retain the
same quality as the master, or would I lose something in resaving the AVI
file? (Instead of a single master of the whole tape, I would end up with 3
smaller AVI files to serve as masters of each of the events on the tape.)

If my intention is to turn my projects into DVDs, I assume I should save the
completed project as DV-AVI (for best quality) and then use my DVD authoring
software to create the DVD. If I'm going to post it online or send it to
someone for viewing on his or her computer, WMV is okay. Correct?

I'm thinking that with the cost of storage today, it just may be worthwhile
to go out and buy a 250-300GB hard drive (or maybe 2 for redundancy) to use
for archival purposes. I have a couple of USB enclosures I can easily swap
drives in and out of.

Any feedback, thoughts, ideas, etc for someone new to using MM are greatly
appreciated.

Gary

 

[PapaJohn]

Seems like you have a pretty good understanding of the options....

The DV format is fixed by standards as 720x480 (NTSC).... if you shoot a
standard or a widescreen clip, it's that in pixel dimensions... but they
are non-square pixels.

The computer environment uses square pixels, so the standard 4:3 DV-AVI
clips are shown in Movie Maker at 640x480..... while widescreen 16:9 ones
are displayed at 853x480. Movie Maker displays it based on a tag in the file
that tells if it's standard or widescreen, not showing it based on its pixel
dimensions.

Opening the same DV-AVI file in an app such as VirtualDub displays it at
720x480, as it doesn't use the tag in the file, but the pixel dimensions.

DV-AVI on the computer is the same as the file on the mini-DV tape.... and
best for maintaining quality from one generation to the next thru editing
sessions.

I keep my original tapes, not recording over them.... you could consider
them or the DV-AVI files on a hard drive as the originals. With the prices
of USB2 hard drives today, I use lots of them for video files, and keep the
primary C drive free for other things.

 

[gary]

Thanks for the feedback PapaJohn. Your website contains a wealth of great
inforformation that I'll be availing myself of as well.

gary

 

[PapaJohn]

thanks Gary...