On Tue, 18 Aug 1998 04:36:05 GMT, PBarton@tennyson.com.au (Peter Barton) wrote:
>On Fri, 14 Aug 1998 17:38:35 GMT, d_ruether@hotmail.com (Neuman-Ruether)
>wrote:

>>>I finish filming the movie...have all the takes ready for post production. I
>>>edit on my computer so I suppose I'm going to need to buy a new video
>>>capture card with a firewire plugin. (Any suggestions?)

>>I have been happy with the DPS Spark (with ver. 2 software) combined
>>with Premiere 4.2 - but set-up is not necessarily easy. It would be
>>good to have a VERY computer-literate helper nearby, if you are
>>not V.c.l. yourself...;-)

>I was told by a salesperson that the record time limit for a direct DV
>dump from a camcorder would be about 8 minutes, due to a 2GB file size
>limit for AVI files under Windows. Is this correct?
>
>I was told the only product I could use for dumping and editing large
>slabs of DV material would be the FAST DV Master, which would cost
>almost 3 times as much as the camcorder itself. On top of which it
>sounds like I need a LOT more hard drive space to play with.
>
>Are these figures correct, or was this sales guy wrong?

Sorta wrong...
Going onto the computer HD from the DV camcorder, the 2-gig AVI
limit (which exists for any mini-DV card, BTW) allows the capture
of up to 9.5 minutes of mini-DV in a single AVI file. It is easy to
manually capture multiple 9.5-minute chunks, with slight overlaps
(we ARE going to edit this material, anyway, right...?;-). I have not
tried this, but it appears that Spark ver. 2 software allows multiple
AVI-file capture from a capture time-code list. When going back to
tape, the Spark ver.2 software is able to output a series of large AVI
files seamlessly (though my set-up, at least, requires adding a
repeat frame to the beginning of each clip), for making long videos.
For HD's, figure about 13 gigs for an hour of stored video (IBM 14-gig
Deskstar UDMA IDE drives work well for this, and they are reasonably
cheap [the 8-gig version is even cheaper...]).