Large Video Capturing - Editing - Compressing?

[FaMiNe]

k, I have a rather long video I captured on my analog camcorder, I can get my software to capture the video/audio (everything's set up hardware-wise)

problem is, the video is over 2 hours long, and I wanted to edit some things out, put some overlays on, maybe some transitions...

Anyway, I was under the impression that I could rip the whole thing, but since I only have about 50gb free, and uncompressed video takes about 1gb/minute at 640x480, I'm looking for some alternatives

Basically I'd like to know the best way to go about getting all this stuff on my hard drive...

for instance, could I capture the video, compressing in real time, so I can fit the whole thing on my harddrive, and edit while compressed? This doesnt seem to be very feasable, because I imagine the quality would lack, quite a bit...

As you can tell I'm sure, I'm new to video editing, but I've ripped and compressed dvd's and the like...

If things get too hard, I can just live with editing with only deleting scenes, and leave the transitions and stuff out... (But I'd like to be able to do those)

So... recap - need to capture analog video ~2hrs long, only 55gb, want good quality, would like to edit video in its entirety, if possible. (final video will be in DivX 5.02 codec)

[edit]
I'd also like to get the resolution at 640x480... as 352x288 seems pixelated (maybe its just me)... capturing at this resolution+compressing is giving me laggy video, any way to fix something like this without reducing resolution? (I wonder if its possible to take chunks of the video uncompressed, compress them and put them together, and then edit once you have the whole compressed video?)
[/edit]

[johnbmx4christ]

capture how you are except..when your hard drive is about 1/2 full..take your captured video (with audio) put it into virtual dub and resave it using a codec called "huffy uv" (its a "lossless" codec) then delete the original cap..then capture from where you left off, and keep doing this...UNLESS....download the huffy uv codec and see if your machine will let you capture with it..mine wont.then edit it how you want and encode to your divx.i have a 16 gig hard drive and this is the way i need to do it for now..it works but takes patience.

[FaMiNe]

going to try that now... read an article recommending use of that codec, but I wasnt sure if it would reduce the file size much, anyway... thanks for the reply, will get back with the results =D

[FaMiNe]

My machine's letting me capture at 640x480 using the HUFFY UV codec, filesize is acceptable... one thing though, I'm getting some minor interlacing (minor because of the decent framerate+res), should I just run the deinterlacing thingie when I compress to DivX? or is there some better way to take care of it?

[johnbmx4christ]

i think its better to do it when its time to compress to divx.