Video Capture questions

[nthfinity]

i have a digital still camera that does video as a secondary... 320x280 or so... not great, and not near the quality, or recording time im looking to share with JW for an event taking place next week. im sure the still images i will make, however will be of excellent calibur.

i have available a fine mini dvd camcorder, what i dont have is a capture device of any sort, and i unfortunatley dont have the available funds to get a new video combo card, such as an 'all in one' radeon and such... and i doubt i can go as fancy as jabba's setup.

im not a big fan of windows movie maker, or U lead editing; but if thats all i have available, that will due fine.



so my questions come to this
i could buy a firewire card, and capture the film such as that, but it would be fairly raw. i am quite unfamiliar with converting mpeg----> AVI compression, what would be a good program to use to do that?
also, is there a specific codec that is quite good for low filesize, with good quality?

[gigdy]

so does your mini dvd cam thing record straight onto dvds you can play on a dvd player? if so u coud jut rip then convert it.

[SKYLiNE_R33]

so my questions come to this
i could buy a firewire card, and capture the film such as that, but it would be fairly raw. i am quite unfamiliar with converting mpeg----> AVI compression, what would be a good program to use to do that?
also, is there a specific codec that is quite good for low filesize, with good quality?

buy/borrow a hauppage DV wizard (http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_dv.html) card if you can (they are fairly cheap.. ~£30/£35 in the uk)
ignore the software that comes with it and capture the uncompressed video with virtualdub(hope you have a decent sized h/d.. as it uses ~1gb/minute disk space), then compress/encode once with xvid codec for bext results..

:D

[AlienDB7]

For MPEG -> AVI, you can use VirtualDub to do the conversion. For simple editing, it does the job fairly well. VirtualDub supports reading of MPEG1.

Like Dan said, XviD is very good for low bitrate caps. I can usually squeeze a 320x240 video under 5M/min.

[evoWalo]

does your computer have firewire/ieee1394 port?

[nthfinity]

so does your mini dvd cam thing record straight onto dvds you can play on a dvd player? if so u coud jut rip then convert it.

mini dv tapes


does your computer have firewire/ieee1394 port?

not yet, i wasnt concerned about such a port when i built my computer.

dan, alien thanks for your help

i should have enough free hdd space with about 120 gigs free.. (of 300) :-D