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Footage overload! how the hell did they do it??
Bit of background on the project:
A client’s legal dept asked for a favour. They have an upcoming court case about a dispute between 2 neighbours and they need around 15 hours of video footage shot by one of the couples condensing down on to as few DVDs as possible.Most of the footage is taken from a locked off camcorder in the couple’s flat. The discs are all in DVD format and I’ve used mpeg streamclip to extract the video in order to condense it in FCP. The extracted QT files are huge – the biggest is 23Gb. I can compress it way down of course, but burning back onto DVD is proving troublesome as some of the compressed clips, even though small in terms of data are still 4.5 hours long. I’m having to use dual-layer discs which is fine but quite time consuming, so how on earth did the couple manage to get 4.5 hours of footage onto 4.7Gb discs in the first place? Would one of those camcorders that records straight to DVD have done that?
The legal dept don’t know, and as they are using my services kind of ‘under the table’ we can’t ask the couple.
It’s not hugely important I guess, but I’m interested to know anyway…
Cheers
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4 Replies
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[Neil Weaver] “how on earth did the couple manage to get 4.5 hours of footage onto 4.7Gb discs in the first place? Would one of those camcorders that records straight to DVD have done that? “
Most set-top DVD recorders can record 4.5 hours on a 4.7GB single-layer DVD.
in fact, many can record up to 6 hours.It doesn’t look very good (single field per frame, and lots of compression artifacts) but it is viewable for certain purposes.
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The camera or standalone DVD recorder has a LP/EP setting.
Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Board of Directors
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group -
D’oh! I’d forgotten all about DVD recorders – that has to be how they did it. Footage quality is pretty terrible, but for the purposes of the recording – which was mostly to pick up audio of the neighbour being abusive or walking past their window goose-stepping – it’s satisfactory.
Cheers! -
Of course the QT settings you use when exporting from Streamclip will affect the size of your quicktimes.
23GB from a 4.7G DVD? Perhaps you are throwing more bits at the video than necessary.
Check the codec you’re using and/or the bitrate or quality setting.
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