Video Clip download

[redbaron_snoopy]

I downloaded a clip from my video camera to my harddisk and ran out of space after it used up 8gig for ~36mins.
I tried again using a portable harddisk (USB1.1) and it didn't work well (lost a lot of frame)

Does that mean I need a new IDE harddisk ? Or is there a way to make the download file smaller ? Or a way to use the portable HD without poor performance ?

My video cam is a Panasonic PAL-DV type format.
Please see my signature concerning my PC.

Advice appreciated.

[Xayd]

Portable hard drive - no, it's too slow you're gonna lose frames

The reason is it's not encoding the video in any way, it's coming across as basically an uncompressed AVI which is (as you can see) quite large in filesize ;).

Is there a way to compress it? You're not actually capturing when you send the file from the camera to the computer, it's just a file transfer, the file has already been "captured" on the camera.

Perhaps someone else knows of a program that can cache and re-encode DV as it's transferred, but I personally don't know of any such application that will work for the function you require independant of a rather expensive hardware encoder (or a software encoder that would be less expensive than a new hard drive ;)).

I would suggest a bigger hard drive.

Even assuming you managed to get the video to your hard drive, you're gonna fill it just by storing the clip, you don't have any room left to encode it to something else.

20 gigs just isn't enough for digital video imo.

It'll be plenty cheaper on your part to buy the hard drive space and use the free/cheap software out there to encode with (such as Xvid for MPEG4 via VirtualDub, or TMPGENC for MPEG1/2), rather than spend the money on software and a hardware encoder.

[redbaron_snoopy]

Thanks. A new drive it will be then.

[redbaron_snoopy]

Would an external USB2.0 portable disk be acceptable to work with video files ? I remember reading somewhere that USB2.0 bandwidth is many times higher than USB1.
Or is IDE/ATA a necessary choice ?

[Xayd]

Latency is the key, and no matter which USB spec it is it's gonna be higher than a real drive.

SCSI is still the best solution since the drives are more durable, the controller more reliable, and the access times on SCSI drives very low. However the 8 meg cache IDE drives do perform very well.