Capturing video

[Jeffrey]

I will PAY anyone who can solve this problem!

I have a good computer and good equipment, but everytime I try to capture video, it tells me my hard drive is full after only 8 or 9 minutes.

Here are my PC specs:

Athlon 1700, 1.5Mhz

512MB DDR memory (266 mhz)

60 GB HD (40% full) 5400 rpm, ATA100

I am recording from a pretty standard VHS machine (SVHS, but normal mode).

I tried to capture video with a Dazzle 80, but it would drop frames, so I upgraded to a Pinnacle AV/DV (an internal capture card). It no longer drops frames, and my Audigy sound card is capturing all of the audio.

Just short of 10 minutes it gives me a "Disk Full" error. This happens with 3 different programs. It cannot be full because it can capture and save 10 minutes at a time... I've played around with the virtual memory settings, but no result. The audio continues, but the video reads error. This happened with the dazzle and the pinnacle.

I tried decreasing frame rate, quality, etc. -- the result is always the same. Does anyone have an idea of what I am doing wrong? How much space does video take? I should be able to capture a full hours worth of analog!

Someone here must have captured video before? Otherwise, can you point me to a good forum that may help? It doesn't make sense.

 

[mal]

Have you defragged lately?

 

[Jeffrey]

yes. That was my first thought: I did a clean disk and defrag. It didn't alter performance.

 

[Alexvrb]

Umm, what are you capturing the video AS? Uncompressed video is very big. So unless you're capturing directly to some sort of compressed format (high settings MPEG2, or even lossless like huffyuv), you're going to be sucking up HD space fast. Have you tried recording a short clip and seeing how big it is? Tell me how big a 30 second video is.

 

[gameboy900]

Yes uncompressed video IS HUGE. Each frame (assuming 640x480 size) is 900Kb. So that's almost 30MB of disk space for 1 SECOND of video. Another consideration is what the file system on your hard drive is. If you're using Fat16 (heaven forbid) you have a limit of 2GB per file. Fat32 is 4GB and NTFS is several terrabytes....which you won't be reaching anytime soon. If you reach one of these limits then the software will crap out on you.

 

[Alexvrb]

Yeah, you could capture to huffyuv and then encode later, or capture to mpeg2 and encode at your leisure (or keep it semi-bloat, or burn it to DVD, etc).

 

[Jeffrey]

my HD is FAT32. I am using XP on the same drive (swap file issues?). The files were quite large, tho' I have since erased them.

I checked out all the preferences the software offered, but I don't see any option to change how I capture the file. How can I fix this? I've heard that I need special hardware to capture as a compressed format.

I can't seem to use the pinnacle software because it crashes my system during installation EVERY time. (that's another issue).

 

[Curtis]

Try Dscaler or Virtualdub to capture - you should be able to capture to just about any format with one of these apps. Using gameboy's numbers (which look about right, give or take a couple of Mb/sec), I seem to get an 18Gb file for 10 mins of capture which doesn't fit with any of the file system limits. I would suggest you are already capturing in a compressed format and you are running into the FAT32 file system limit this way.

You should be able to convert your drive to NTFS, but make sure you backup anything important first.

Try http://www.dvdrhelp.com for more info.

 

[Alexvrb]

Converting to NTFS is probably a good idea anyway. Oh, and about Virtualdub, you can't capture directly into some formats if you don't have the CPU power. For instance, you could probably capture directly to Divx as long as you did so on normal or fast without any pro settings. But with slower settings or pro features, you can't do it in real time. You could always try huffyuv (or similar) with virtualdub or virtualdubmod. Then you could crunch the lossless result later with Divx or MPEG2 (which is the format SVCDs and DVDs use, if you wanted to burn it).

OR you could just capture directly to MPEG2 (I think VirtualDubMod does this), and maybe encode or burn it later. MPEG2 at DVD bitrates will look great and its not nearly as huge as uncompressed. A 4.7GB DVD+-R can store an hour at full quality, and that includes huge AC3 audio. I don't know if vdubmod still captures AC3 on its own or if you'd need AC3filter.

Here's a Guide for capturing (just to give you an idea, you don't have to use huffyuv or MJPEG), and here is an Interesting Article on interlacing.