User Guide

Chapter 2: Capturing Video 35
Full-quality capture
You have two choices for the way the video data is
encoded and compressed in full-quality captures. For
most purposes, DV format is the logical choice, but if
you are planning to output your finished movie to disc
(VCD, S-VCD or DVD), MPEG format may be
preferred.
Studio can capture DV in real time, even at full quality.
MPEG captures typically are slower. Exactly how
much slower depends on the quality settings you
choose and on the speed of your machine. An MPEG
movie requires much less disk space than the
equivalent full-quality DV movie (although with
SmartCapture this is not generally a concern).
DV
DV is a high-resolution format with correspondingly
high storage requirements.
Your camcorder compresses and stores video on the
tape at 3.6 MB/s, which is broadcast-quality video.
With full-quality capture, the video data is transferred
directly from the camcorder tape to your PC hard drive
with no changes or additional compression. Due to the
high quality, capturing at this setting does take up a lot
of disk space, so you may want to pick and choose
small segments to capture instead of the entire tape.
You can calculate the amount of disk space you will
need by multiplying the length of your video in seconds
by 3.6 MB/s. For example:
1 hour of video = 3600 seconds (60 x 60)
3600 seconds x 3.6 MB/s = 12,960 MB
Hence 1 hour of video uses 12.9 GB of storage.