I have a Ulead video capture card, with the corresponding software. I started to record a home video. At the end of 20 minutes, it had gobbled up 34 gigs of my drive, and closed down (I only have a 60 gig drive, and, there are onlly about 40 gigs for actual use.) Just as bad, when I maximized the screen to view my 20 minutes worth (It was about a 1 to 2 hour project) it was those horrible giant pixels-and that was only on my laptop. There is no way I can use it on a standard tv monitor
Is there a way that I can record my show without using all of this drive space? I didn’t think that even store bought DVD’s took up THAT much space.
Also, would another format spare me this hideous pixellation, and can watch it on a regular TV?
Thanks,
greatshakes
Its obviously capturing the video uncompressed, but still – 34gigs in 20 minutes is 28mb/sec, a ridiculously high rate. I’m surprised your laptop can even push data to the hard drive at that sustained rate.
Ditch the Ulead card. Get a DV camera. One with video in connectors, and you can just record to that, and then use a cheap 1394/firewire connection to move it to your computer. DV is about 13gigs/hour, or close to 1/10th the size of whatever you’re capturing, is very good quality, and there’s a large variety of software you can use to edit DV.
ETA: tell me the product name of your capture card. ULead is the company, tell me the specific product.
ETA: ULead doesn’t seem to make a video capture card (at least I can’t find one on their web site). Are you sure its not some other video card bundled with ULead software?
Capture to a compressed format. It’s been a while since I did a lot of video capture, but I always used VirtualVCR. I would always use the HuffyUV lossless codec, which is about 2/3 the size of uncompressed, but that will probably still be too big for you. However, you would get the best quality by capturing in one of those bloated formats and encoding it to MPEG-2 (DVD) or whatever your end product is going to be. One possible solution would be to do that two or three times, encoding your capture to your end format after each half hour or so, then splicing them together.
The easier way would be to capture directly to your end format. If you do it that way, you won’t have the space constraints, but quality may suffer, as the computer has to “think” about how it’s encoding your MPEG at the same time that you’re capturing.
I think it may be a Syntek STK1150 EasyCap.
Also, what’s a DV camera? I’m guessing I can’t afford one right now, but maybe I can.
Pardon my ignorance, but about the only computer stuff I know is Internet, and Windows Office.
Thanks,
greatshakes
Of my options on the software, I have, in addition to AVI, MPEG, DVD, sdvd, etc…
Is this what you mean about mpeg-2, and capturing to my end format? I can take the hit on quality for *some * of my projects.
Thanks,
greatshakes
The “DVD” choice will be DVD-compliant MPEG-2 video. It will be compatible with a normal DVD player. “MPEG” is most likely MPEG-1, an older format that doesn’t look as good.
If you install other video codecs, you will have more output choices. It depends what you want to use the video for. An MPEG-4 format like XviD would be ideal if the video will always be played on a computer and not on a standalone DVD player (although some of those do support it).
ETA: Video capture and encoding is something that can be easy, or it can be a rather involved and complex process. Depends how much you want to mess with the options. I’d recommend getting at least some sort of grounding in the basics, though. VideoHelp.com has a lot of good tutorials.
So, if I record in/to DVD, will I probably get my full 1-2 hours on my computer?
Thanks,]
greatshakes
Yes. It may ask you for an average bitrate. Here is a bitrate calculator to help you figure out how high you can go and still fit it on a DVD.
DV. DV cameras aren’t free, but they’re not all that pricey these days. I see MiniDV cameras on Best Buy’s site in the sub-$300 range. There’s a Samsung one there that’s $199.
One thing I’m unclear on – are you actually videotaping your own material using a video camera, and capturing the result to your computer? Or just capturing video from a feed like cable TV and doing mashups of some sort? Or maybe you’re converting old tapes to digital?
Old tapes to digital. I used to be in video production, before digital became affordable.
Thanks for your help!
Also, thanks to neutron star.
greatshakes
OK, that clarifies, thanks. What format are your source tapes? Beta? A consumer format / other?
OK, I was thinking the simplest plug-n-play approach would be a DV camera --last I looked, some DV cameras had video (composite or s-video) inputs, and would record from those inputs to the tape in the camera. If you’re really lucky, you just feed video to the camera and it will spit it out, digitized as a DV stream, to the firewire output, and you can capture that signal to your computer in real time using a firewire port + DV/1394 capture software. But if not, you’re making a reasonably quick and high quality digital backup of your analog video tape (althought MiniDV isn’t the most stable tape format), and you can turn around and capture whatever bits you like later to your computer using firewire. And you still get a DV camera for whatever other use you want to make of it.
What you have now is a (I think – the Syntek EasyCap doesn’t seem to be sold anymore?) USB device that can deliver YUV444 to the computer, and save it uncompressed. If the computer & Ulead software can compress the data on the fly and keep up – which seems likely, but is definitely a fiddly solution – you can just tell it to do so, you’ll be fine.
If “fiddly solution” means halfassed or something of that nature, it should be noted that that’s how most TV cards are designed to work. If it’s right there in the instruction book and a prominent option in the included software, it’s not exactly some sort of backdoor hack.
“fiddly” to me means “hard to understand, hard to set up, easy to get wrong, easily broken”. Which seems the state that the OP is in right now, or he’d be off getting work done, and not asking for help on the internet and “fiddling” with setup dialogs.
Ahhhh, okay. That makes sense. I’d never heard anyone use that word that way before. In that case, yeah, it can be pretty fiddly.
Even with compressed video your drive is absurdly small to be horsing arond with video. You can get 320 gig 2.5" external portable USB drives for less than $ 130. Larger 3.5 drives are even less.
greatshakes, I missed answering part of your question:
No idea on the pixelization – it sounds like your video player is messing up somehow. 
On playing back to NTSC/PAL out – some laptops have an s-video out, you can mirror the output to that. If you have a DV camera and a 1394/firewire output, you can use appropriate software to play out of the firewire port to the DV camera, and from the DV camera’s analog outputs to a television.
It’s doable for what he’s working on, I’d say - especially if it’s a one-off thing, and he’s not doing any editing. How do you think people did this stuff when 60GB drives were the norm?