What is the best way to make high quality video with a low filesize using a video camera? I'm interested in recording myself playing console games like Xbox and GameCube and then compressing it on the computer and sending them to people. How I used to do this in the past with capture cards is record myself playing uncompressed in both video and audio, and then I'd load VirtualDub and compress the file down to size. Makes pretty good quality at a low size, and it worked wonders. However, today's capture cards, like my TV Wonder Elite with their hardware compression cause 1 or 2 second lag when you try to play on your computer, making it impossible to play. So it's probably easier to make vids with a video camera.
What I do is hook my GameCube up to the VCR, which is tied to the TV, through Composite Video In. I then take the Sony video camera and hook it up to the VCR through Composite Video Out. Then I press record on the camera and play on the TV and it will be captured on the camcorder tape. Once I have the footage, I hook my camcorder up to my computer using an Sony ILink FireWire cable. Then I go into Windows Movie Maker to capture the footage. Now here's the tricky part for me, picking the video settings. I'm not particularily a fan of WMVs very much because it does not load in Virtual Dub or any other program besides WMM, which I'm not a fan of to do my editing. WMV's also force people to use Windows Media Player and some people don't like that. Unfortunately, that's all Windows Movie Maker seems to want to encode in, except for one setting: Digital Device Format (DV-AVI). This captures the video and sound pretty much uncompressed at about 180MB/min. This is great and all, because it can then be loaded up into Virtual Dub, since it's an AVI file, and be edited, tweaked, and compressed down to a smaller size. There's only one problem: scanlines appear during motion, also called interlace lines. Here is an example:
Deinterlacing this with a Virtual Dub filter will get rid of the interlace, but as a result, the picture looks a bit blurry. Perhaps there is a better way to deinterlace the video that I am not aware of. The reason why I want my videos in AVI so bad is because the video is so customizable (can be cropped, trimmed, shortened, filters can be added, compression options, etc). WMV is pretty much what you see, what you get. And Windows Movie Maker give you little advanced options (eg. you can't select the bit rates or the resolutions, there are only preset modes).
Basically, what is the fastest and best way to make videos with high quality and a low filesize either using a capturing device or a camcorder?
