Digital Videos?
 

I need a little help from some of you guys who are more framiliar with digtial video and digital video editing. I have a camcorder,sadly it does not connect directly to my computer. I have a Dazzle 80 adapter which makes it so that I can put the video on the system. The program which came with the Dazzle adapter is called MGI Video Wave 4. It is a good program, but it creates the videos as avi files that are gigantic. We're talking like 20 megabytes for 5 seconds. I have about an hour and a half I want to put on my computer. Are there any other decent programs out there that I can use to capture the video directly from the dazzle, and if not can any of you give me any information on how to encode the video as a Divx file? Thanks a ton guys.
-Tim

Digital video editing is something I've been heavily involved in for the past 6 months or so.

If you don't want to be frustrated with the process make sure that your equipment can handle it. As you found out the capture files are gigantic. It takes 200 megs for each 60 seconds of video. But the good news is that hard drives are cheap. I would recommend a minimum of a 60 gig hard drive. In fact it will be even better to have 2 drives: one dedicated to captures only. Here's my setup:

Pentium 4 1.4Ghz
60 Gig hard drive
30 Gig hard drive
128 Meg RAM - bare minimum
32 Meg video card
Canon Elura 2MC MiniDV camcorder

The software I chose is the StudioDV from Pinnacle. It only costs $90 and comes with a FireWire card. In addition it has a nice feature allowing you to capture in 'Preview' mode to avoid filling up your hard disk with the AVI files. However I find it less problematic to capture in full resolution.

The sequence of events I usually follow is as follows:
1. Capture the footage via FireWire from camcorder to PC
2. Edit the footage (transitions, titles, cuts, etc)
3. Render the movie, outputting first to an mpeg2 format, then back to MiniDV tape as the final product.

For answers to your question on outputting to DVD, check out this link:
www.vcdhelp.com

Good luck,
Boris

porsche911
 

I'm not very experienced with all this, but I think VirtualDub (http://www.virtualdub.org/) may be just what you need. While rather simple looking at first, you can do quite a lot with it, including encoding to just about any format, including DivX.

Be sure to put some of you footage online!

This is a complex subject.

First, file formats like avi and mpg should not be confused with codecs. The codec is what determines the size of the resulting clip. You can make very small avis. The codecs that are compatible with avi and mpg are very different and not interchangeable.

If your goal is to make small movies for web or VCD/DVD and you do not plan to get into heavy editing then you should encode directly from the camera into mpg format using a Dazzle DVC II. The reason I recommend this device is because the encoding will be done in real time with the hardware. This device does not support DV or firewire transfers.

If non-linear editing is your bag then go for a DV camera and a DV capture board and use Adobe Premiere.

If you attempt to do software encoding please be aware that the process is painfully slow, it often takes much more than one hour to encode an hour of video.

Thanks for the info guys. Ed that program was EXACTLY what I needed. I just converted a 300mb file to 23mb. THANKS!!
-Tim