EricBall's Tech Projects - Video is BIG

RSS Bot · September 16, 2009

A decade or so ago I bought a Hi8 camcorder. With it my wife and I have shot the usual assortment of home movies. Now my wife wants to use iMovie to change those tapes into DVDs. (Probably not a bad idea - before those tapes start dying.). These days we use the movie capability of my wife's Canon S3 instead of the camcorder.

Of course, getting from point A to B isn't a simple process. The first step is to use the capture card in my old PC to make an AVI using HuffYUV lossless compression. This gets saved to a internal drive with 60GB free. Even with this much space it can only hold 90 minutes.

Although HuffYUV is great for capturing video, iMovie is fairly picky on what video formats it will import. So the next step is to use ffmpeg to convert the AVI to DV and write it to a 60GB NTFS partition on an external USB drive. This is a time consuming process and converting the 90 minutes capture takes over 3.5 hours. Because DV is compressed the drive will hold 4.5 hours.

Then she can connect the external drive to her MacBook and import the DV file into iMovie, which copies it to a second 60GB partition on the external drive - this one HFS formatted. (Although I'm going to repartition the drive since the NTFS partition only needs to hold 90 minutes.) Keeping everything on the external drive means she's not filling up her MacBook (and the TimeMachine backup) with video.

The size of these files is mind boggling to someone who started on 64k computers and 20MB hard drives. I first had the external drive formatted FAT32, but then the DV files were limited to 4GB or a little over 18 minutes. Older versions of iMovie were limited to 2GB or 9 minutes per clip.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?app=blog&blogid=7&showentry=6454