can 38 mins of transferred S8 really be 132gb?

[steve hyde]

I got my first reel of S8 transferred to mini dv and used Final Cut Pro to capture the stuff. I used a G5 at the university where I work and brought along my 40gb external thinking I'd just shuttle it over and be done with it. Problem is the captured video turned out to be 132gb. Is this normal?

Thanks in advance. 8O

[monobath]

I can't answer your question, but I'm a little confused by your description. You say 38 minutes of S8 in the subject, then mention "my first reel of S8 transferred to mini dv..." in the body of your post.

At 18 fps, 1 reel of S8 is 3 minutes 20 seconds. No way that can be 132GB. 38 minutes at 18fps would be about 11 carts (36.6 minutes) or at 24 fps about 15 carts (37.5 minutes).

So which is it? One cart or eleven or fifteen?

[Scotness]

The amount of carts isn't really the question - 38 minutes is 38 minutes - what the question is is which codec are you using -- sounds like it might even be uncompressed -- I'm on a PC and don't know too much about macland - but I think on each platform with a standard dv codec you should get about 1 hour of footage into 13 gigs. Make sure you select a good codec too - older ones will artefact more -- you can get lossless ones too but I theie file size will probably be around 3 to 4 times bigger.
Some mac users here could probably reccomend some good codecs.

Scot

[steve hyde]

Thanks folks, To clarify my reference to the term reel: I've got 8 carts spooled onto a reel. It's 38 mins because I shot the carts at variable frame rates. It's an exerimental reel that consists of different film stocks. I am sort of an unsupervised student of film.....If you know what I mean.

This stuff is uncompressed and transferred by Flying Spot Transfer in Seattle.
I'll look into the codecs bit. To be honest, I don't know what codecs means--
However, by this time tomorrow I will....learning is the fun part.

Again, thanks,

Steve

[Astro]

I've got about 45mins of footage on my 40GB media drive and it's nowhere near full. What tape format are you importing from?
All my stuff if flying-spot telecine dumped down on to DVCAM.

You probably know this, but make sure you don't overload your Macs hard drive otherwise you can fragment the Hard drive which nearly destroyed my G3...I can only use it for writing now.
Astro

[mattias]

This stuff is uncompressed

i thought you said it was mini dv?

I'll look into the codecs bit.

just look at the capture presets in "log anc capture" and select "ntsc dv". any other setting will make you lose quality and/or hd space.

/matt

[steve hyde]

Okay-- the tape type is a mini DV Master and the 132gb capture is sitting on a university owned G5 at the moment and I haven't gone back to retreive it because I'm in the throes of driving myself mad with a mid-summer writing project on my PC at home. It sounds like the culprit of my video capture problem is my own inexperience using Final Cut. .....The key question I hoped to have answered by this post was basically if 132gb was unusual for an uncomressed 38 min S8 transfer. Your responses to my post lead me to believe that this is unusual and thank you for that.

Naturally, I want to maintain every pixel of every image that I've captured so that I can output this footage to DVD in an attempt to see how good or bad S8 looks on DVD. This 38 min reel contains tri-x, k40, and k200T shot under different lighting conditions, ususally under natural light, but a few scenes with tungstun light as well. I can tell you right now the tungstun lights greatly increased the amount of visual information captured. Overall, I'm pleased with the Flying Spot Transfer and I'm already convinced S8 is a viable format especially given the advances in film stocks (Vision 200T and Vision 500T) and the scanning technologies housed at places like Flying Spot. My cost breakdown goes something like this for an 8 cart 20 min reel shot at 24fps:

Kodak Vision Film raw stock: 8 * 11 = 88.00
processing: 8 * 12= 90.00
clean and prep at Forde: 18.00
Transfer at Flying Spot 150.00
Total $346.00 USD

One could knock onehundred dollars off this cost if you shoot k40

FYI on film costs: The Kodak student discount, USA

Okay, I'm stalling....now back to writing.

Steve

[Scotness]

There's a good thread discussing much about codecs here:
http://www.8mm.filmshooting.com/scripts ... php?t=6036

Scot

[mattias]

Your responses to my post lead me to believe that this is unusual

correct.

I want to maintain every pixel of every image that I've captured

follow my codec advice above and you'll get it. for any intermediate renders, use a lossless codec like "animation" if you're really, really concerned of not losing a single bit of information even if nobody will ever notice, or dv for that too if you want to keep file sizes down and still have great results (see the other thread mentioned).

/matt

[T-Scan]

Hmmm,

I had 8 carts transferred onto MiniDV by the Flying Spot recently. 20 minutes shot at 24fps. the captired MiniDV file was around 4.5 GB.

[Freya]

.The key question I hoped to have answered by this post was basically if 132gb was unusual for an uncomressed 38 min S8 transfer. Your responses to my post lead me to believe that this is unusual and thank you for that.

132gb might not be unusual for an uncompressed transfer to your mac.
It seems unlikely but I wonder if you aren't really doing an uncompressed transfer somehow? We are all assuming that you aren't here. You are transferring the data by firewire yes?

I should point out that if you have a mini dv tape of your footage then it is already compressed, as dv is a compressed format (as digibeta is for that matter!) Ideally you want to keep your footage in the compressed dv format, at the very least till you have shipped it home.

If you transfer your footage over firewire to the dv codec on your mac, it should be a bit for bit copy of what was on the tape.

It is important to use high quality codecs when you come to actually edit the film however, because as you edit, certain functions may cause the file to be uncompressed and recompressed, every time this happens you lose quality. Some codecs are better than others for this, the microsoft DV codec is famously bad!

This tends to happen more with things like changing the colour or adding video effects to your film more than straight editing.

love

Freya

[wahiba]

Looks about right for uncompressed .avi files.

[steve hyde]

Ah, this is emensely helpful. Warmest thanks for taking the time to chime in on this post. As soon as I get back to this project on the mac and turn out some results, I will do my best to explain what happened. However, in the mean time, I did capture the 38min of S8 footage on my PC at home using "Microsoft movie Maker" and that .avi amounted to 6.5gb of disk space.

What do I want to do now?

I want to install the trial version of Premiere onto my home PC so that I can explore the world of color correction and contrast control and as I said in an earlier post, output to dvd with chapters for each photographic experiment and subtitles that describe what I did so that I can use the thing as a learning tool.

Again, thanks!

Steve

[crimsonson]

38 mins of uncompress, depending on the codec, is somewhere between 38-65 GB.

Depending on how you setup the batch capture, 38 minutes should have not resulted in a 132 GB file, unless you captured in HD format. But I doubt you did.

You may have some corrupt QT files. This happens once in a while with FCP. If you crashed during capture or stopped it midway, often FCP will leave a 'blank' QT movie in the Capture folder.