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Video Editors

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Happy Expat:
I guess I'm now going back to the cellar to re-encode all the tapes to files at maximum possible resolution and transfer them to a pluggable Drive without the 4GiB file size limit and then bring them back to this machine and spend some happy retirement time creating something Cecil B.Demille would chunder upon ;D.
Another quick question:
The EZCAP device and/or ShowBiz permit three levels of MPEG2 "quality" if I try all three variants, how can I tell if the higher resolutions are simply extrapolated?

4wd:
I'm not sure that you'll be able to capture from the EzyCAP to a USB HDD, (I'm talking USB2 of a few years old), without a lot of dropouts due to the way the USB ports are controlled, (polling by the host).

One way to find out I guess.

By MPEG2 quality I'm pretty sure they mean bitrate - the higher the bitrate, the better the quality, (in theory), up to ~9.8MB/s for the video stream.  The three settings might be something like 3500, 6000, and 8000kbps.

If you run MediaInfo on a short sample of each quality it should tell you.

Here's an online bitrate calculator that'll tell you the minimum transfer rate that your HDD will need to maintain to ensure it's not the cause of frame drops, stuttering, etc.

Video Bitrate Calculator

If you click the link for DVD (PAL) on the right, you'll see that you need to maintain a minimum rate of ~15.55MB/s to the HDD - I'm guessing that's at the rate of a normal movie release DVD but you'll probably need to be somewhere close to that.

Happy Expat:
Checking the software again, I can see that I can't control the rate at which the stream is either captured or written to disk. It's the edited save compression post-capture that I can define and, as I won't be using ShowBiz for any of the post processing - that's purely academic.
Once I know what my source quality is, I can control the format and compression through Power Director.
When I experimented with capture straight to a USB stick earlier, the dropout rate was awful, so I imagine the throughput to a pluggable hard drive will be just as dire. Only got USB2 on the XP but obviously, I can simply capture to the XP's HDD and then transfer to the pluggable 1TB drive. When I move it to the 8.1 machine, hopefully the OS error correction protocols should ensure a smooth transfer and I can take advantage of the USB3's superior throughput. With 1.6TB free on this box, I think I may just be able to cope.
One of the joys of transferring on the XP in the cellar is that I can set a timer and then come back up here and stay in touch with the rest of the world pro tem.

Shades:
I wouldn't trust USB in any way or form for sustained transfers of video, to be honest. Sure the advertised speeds look good, but most coupled products cannot sustain these speeds. I would even go further by saying that not that many products even achieve the advertised speeds. A portable hard disk will drop less frames than a normal pen drive, though.

If you are really serious about video, then get a proper SCSI card and 15.000 rpm SCSI hard disks or even faster. Then you venture in the area of server grade hardware made specifically for you. Don't worry, for the same amount of money you could have bought a new mid-range car of a decent brand. However, dropped frame rates will be non-existent.

A decent internal SATA3 hard disk will do the job you'll ask from it just fine. Don't use USB for capturing video directly, because the quality of USB products varies too much. There are type of ports that were actually designed for these kind of jobs. Firewire in the "old" days, Thunderbolt is the latest I believe.

4wd:
A decent internal SATA3 hard disk will do the job you'll ask from it just fine.-Shades (March 11, 2014, 06:10 PM)
--- End quote ---

No problems here with capturing RAW or DV to 5400RPM IDE HDDs.

UDMA mode 4, (~66MB/s), will cover all analog TV resolutions whether it be a compressed or uncompressed capture.

Even UDMA mode 2 will cover all of them but it's good to have a bit of overhead.

It's a good use for those old IDE HDDs lying around providing you have a computer that still has an IDE port and don't put it on the same port as a ODD or the OS HDD.

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