How To Capture.......

[sfxwe]

Ok, how do I capture uncomprssed AVI.......? Not DV .AVI...but true uncomprssed .AVI!

[setarip]

You can use VirtualDub's built-in capture program - just set it to Uncompressed .AVI...

[Mark Madness]

Capturing in uncompressed AVI is not such a good idea. Your system may not be able to handle the data rate resulting in very jerky video and you'll run out of space really fast, especially at high resolutions. You should try capturing in MPEG-2. It gives really nice quality and isn't such a stress on your system.

[sfxwe]

Well, Thats how I used to capture video for 2 years. Never had a drop frame or anything. I agree though with the space, it took about 1GB for every minute of footage. As I stated in an erlier post I am now have problems, and that is why I want to go back to uncompressed AVI.


As far as V-Dub it doesnt seem to recognize my Firewire and DV Cam. How to I get it to work for me?

[setarip]

This question has been previously addressed several times. I'd suggest that you click on the search button for these forums and enter the word "firewire"...

As is obvious from your second post, you're already aware that capturing UNcompressed .AVI doesn't subject to the lost frames which typicvally result from trying to capture and compress on the fly. You can always use VirtualDub to compress the file at a later time...

[Leo_C]

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but surely capturing uncompressed video from a DV-cam is pointless?

I always thought that the video coming from a DV-cam was compressed - that the signal sent down firewire was some kind of MPEG-2 stream?
And if that's true, then capturing as uncompressed would require your processor to decode each frame before saving to disk?

Or am I completely wrong?


Leo

[sfxwe]

Well, I am new to this too, but I know it isn't in MPEG format cause it has an AVI file extension. The other thing is this, the file size was huge, and there was no distortion at all in the picture / video, even hen I watched it in full screen mode on my 21in monitor at 1280 x 1024. Now when I do a capture the file size is a lot smaller and at full screen it is distorted big time.

The reason I want to caputre at full uncompressed format is the final rendered video was very very clear even after I convert it to mpeg for burning to DVD. At this smaller file size (what they call DV Video), the file output is not as sharp or crisp as before.
I have look through this forum, as I was told to above, and which I had already done, as I look 1st before asking any questions. But I don't see a resolution to this problem of mine. I just want to capture uncomprssed video, but it doesn't seem that anyone can tell me how.

I just needed a little help....can anyone help me out here? Please?

Thanks Again

[Nielchiano]

First of al: .avi tells you nothing!

AVI means just "Audio-Video-inteleaved" which just means that the file contains an audio and a video-stream. It DOES NOT tell you what encoding is used, it can range vrom uncompressed to MJPEG to MPEG to DivX to... The audio the same: uncompressed PCM-MP3-AC3-AAC-.....

I'm not sure about this but I indeed think that DV is a form of MPEG2. And Leo_C is right only if you're capturing through FireWire/iLink/IEEE1394.

If you do capture in IEEE1394 than it is pointless to save in uncompressed on capture. You CANNOT get any better quality than the source.
If you capture via an analogue way (composite/S-video) than this is a totaly different situation and it doesn't matter anymore what the source is.

You tell "the final rendered video" so I suppose you do some editing on it? if so, keep in mind that EVERY time you compress your video to any LOSSY compression, the quality goes down. almost ALL compressions are lossy. There are (to my knowlege) two lossless "compressions": of course Uncompressed AVI (duh) and HuffYuv.
If you compress your intermediate files to this kind of format (I sugest HuffYuv, since the files hare half the size with exactly the same quality) you won't have any downgrade in quality.

Hope this helps,
Nielchiano