Best Capture Settings?
 

Can someone please tell me what the best capture settings are when using pinnicale? I am putting together a project that will be 90 minutes long. Whats the best way to make sure that it fits on a dvd while keeping the quality intact?

I don't know about Pinnacle, but I'm not sure what you mean by "keeping the quality intact"

DVD is compressed so depending on what you're starting with, there may be no way to keep it intact.

An hour of DV (or HD) is 13GB. A single layer DVD is (If I remember) close to 5 GB. So 90 minutes of DV (which is already compressed) would fill 4 or 5 DVD's unless it gets compressed even further. Even a dual layer DVD would be about 8 GB so you'd need 2 or 3 of them.

Unless you're talking about Blu-Ray, further compression (ie lower quality) is a fact of life.

Kevin,

I think what you are actually looking to find out is what is an optimum BITRATE for transcoding. Capture refers to downloading video from your camcorder and there are no options when using Firewire.

I use 6.5mbps for a bitrate. As near as I can figure at this setting I am not losing any resolution by taking the bitrate too low while at the same time I am minimizing the bitrate for best DVD player compatibility. I think that Pinnacle defaults to 8.0mbps which is way too high if you want the best compatibility. At 8mbps you are going to get an occasional client who can't play the DVD.

How is that when you rent or purchase a 90 minute movie, the quality is still so good. Is there another form of compression thats used on big budget films?

Single layer DVD is 4.3GB. Dual Layer is 8.5GB. Most hollywood movie DVDs are on dual layer. Also, they use expensive equipments to start with shooting, editing and encoding. So you can't compare you home made video quality to those from Hollywood studios.

A single layer DVD can hold up to 4 hours of video. But depends on which encoder you use, you will be lucky to get 2 hours there without noticable quality loss. I use Procoder to encode. I can get 3 hours in a single layer DVD and still get good quality.

Your post titles "Best capture settings". I assumed you are talking about DV or HDV capturing. There is no capture settings that affect the quality of video. The quality of video is determined at the time you shoot the video, not at capture time to computer. You will get about 13GB per 1 hour of video.

And besides the better cameras/lenses costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and other expensive stuff, the major studios have something just as important if not more important - namely large staffs of specialists and technical folk who know how to shoot and process and transfer to digital to optimize the product for the distribution media.

$$$ + Skill + Experience is hard to beat!

We can do quite nice work with the tools available, but there are limits.

Thanks for the input everyone.

Kevin

By the way, if you want to provide more info about what exactly it is that you're trying to accomplish, people could be more helpful with your specific situation.

As it is, everyone is limited to making general comments because we don't have any specifics to go on..