I was thinking a one hour tape would have been, but after using windows movie maker the file was around 12 gigs. It was ntsc, 29.97 fps, and 740xsomething. Does this sound right. I thought you could put an hour of uncompressed video on a dvdr. If I put this on a DVD then I'll have to compress it by over 50%.
Hi there. Yes; 12 GB for 1 hour of DV is alright. I got about 10.2 GB for 53 mins of DV captured in the DV format (uncompressed AVI). I did it thru Firewire using Intervideo WinDVR 3, which is a nice program. After I captured the video, I converted it to SVCD format and then burnt the CDs. They look much better than VCDs. I don't have a DVD writer and hence the choice of SVCD.
The AVI file would anyway have to be converted to a DVD compatible MPEG-2 format before writing. So once the conversion is done, you should be able to fit it on 1 DVD comfortably. There will be a little compression, but not much. The quality on the DVD would still be excellent since the DV source is very good too. There would be very little loss in quality.
Just for the record, DV isn't uncompressed. It just doesn't use interframe compression (like MPEG) so each frame can be decompressed without any other frames. Uncompressed AVI would probably be 4-5 times that size. Even HuffYUV, which is generally considered the standard for lossles AVI compression, would give you a file twice that size. As VSG said though, the filesize when it's in AVI format doesn't really mean much since it needs to be encoded to MPEG-2 for DVD authoring.
