Camcorder + Laptop - Req.

Nikolic · 7 Mar 2006 at 16:29

A friend is looking to spend roughly £800 on a laptop, that needs to be able to transfer video from a video camera and encode it in Windows Movie Maker (via Firewire). It needs XP Pro also.

My main question was - does the video card make that much of a difference?

Currently looking at a Dell, 2.0ghz Centrino, 1GB ram, X300.

Thanks in advance.

Baron_Samedi · 7 Mar 2006 at 16:32

Short answer - no - more important will be the speed and capacity of your hard drive.

AVI imported from a DV camcorder will occupy 13Gb per hour...

Energize · 7 Mar 2006 at 16:33

Baron_Samedi said:
Short answer - no - more important will be the speed and capacity of your hard drive.

AVI imported from a DV camcorder will occupy 13Gb per hour...

It only takes up as much space as you set the bitrate to, 1GB an hour in divx/xvid looks perfect.

Nikolic · 7 Mar 2006 at 16:38

It will be on a network (hence Pro being important). Also, the files will pretty much be burned to DVD for storage aswell.

Good, thats why I thought I would go for a model with a fast processor, plus a decent amount of RAM.

Thanks.

Baron_Samedi · 7 Mar 2006 at 16:41

Nikolic said:
It will be on a network (hence Pro being important). Also, the files will pretty much be burned to DVD for storage aswell.

Good, thats why I thought I would go for a model with a fast processor, plus a decent amount of RAM.

Thanks.

Errr, before you can make an XVid or DIVX you will need to capture the contents of the tape to hard drive. That is, unless you know of a software utility that can capture and transcode - if you do, please share it :-)

DVD storage is fine, but the taped footage is bound in an uncompressed AVI wrapper that will need transcoding to XVid etc or MPEG-2 before saving to any kind of disk...

Energize · 7 Mar 2006 at 16:43

If your burning to dvd video mode format, I would reccomend encoding in mpeg-2, doesnt need that much cpu power, takes up 2gb an hour and doesnt need transcoding again to dvd format.

Energize · 7 Mar 2006 at 16:44

Baron_Samedi said:
Errr, before you can make an XVid or DIVX you will need to capture the contents of the tape to hard drive. That is, unless you know of a software utility that can capture and transcode - if you do, please share it

DVD storage is fine, but the taped footage is bound in an uncompressed AVI wrapper that will need transcoding to XVid etc or MPEG-2 before saving to any kind of disk...

Virtual Dub will capture and transcode video and audio at the same time and is free.

Baron_Samedi · 7 Mar 2006 at 16:52

Have you a link to a guide that I can use with VirtualDub to achieve simultaneous capture and transcode?

Pleeeeeeeese :-)

DV will transcode down to a 1Gb per hour MPEG-2 very nicely and allow you to fit around four hours of footage on a single layer DVD formatted disk.

Energize · 7 Mar 2006 at 17:51

I cant see mpeg 2 at 2.2mbps being that good quality, at least not on a large screen, you may notice a quality issue in the future with the dvds.

Anyway, In virtual dub, in the file menu select capture avi. On the video and audio tabs select the input you want to use. On the video and audio tabs there are also compression settings, you may need to use a faster setting on the codec depending on how powerfull your pc is. Depending on what version your using you may be able to select video filters so you add effects and progressive scan deinterlacing as well. When your done with the settings just set the capture file.

The standard version of virtual dub only supports avi capture so you wont be able to compress in mpeg2 but there are modded versions which allow other file containers like, ogm and mkv.

Baron_Samedi · 7 Mar 2006 at 20:50

I don't know how large a screen you need to witness problems but I work with VHS captures that look fine on 32"...

Oh and I really don't know what kind of machine you are using to capture and transcode to Xvid/DivX on the fly in Virtualdub - whichever version you are using...

But you're obviously able to capture, filter and output on the fly and I reckon the Doom9 guys would benefit from hearing how you do it.

Energize · 7 Mar 2006 at 21:43

Baron_Samedi said:
I don't know how large a screen you need to witness problems but I work with VHS captures that look fine on 32"...

Oh and I really don't know what kind of machine you are using to capture and transcode to Xvid/DivX on the fly in Virtualdub - whichever version you are using...

Im using the mpeg 1.6 version of virtual dub and ver 6 divx codec, on an athlon 64 3200 machine. Using the high performance setting designed for live capture.

You'd probably start to notice problems on a 50" screen.