WinTV-USBInstallation and Reference Manual

image size

frames/second

bytes per second

1 minute video

160x120

15 frames/sec

425

Kbytes/sec

26 Mbytes

320x240

15 frames/sec

850

Kbytes/sec

52 Mbytes

320x240

30 frames/sec

1.7

Mbytes/sec

104 Mbytes

Video consumes quite a bit of hard disk space! At 320x240, you will only be able to store about 10 minutes of video on a 1 Gigabyte hard disk!

To reduce the amount of hard disk space used by your digital videos, you can edit the video using one of the popular 32-bit digital video editors (such as Adobe’s Premiere or U-Lead’s MediaStudio). After editing, you can compress the video using a software playback format such as Indeo or Cinepak (both of these are supported by Windows98). Typical compression achieved by these formats is 30:1.

Tips on improving capture performance

Do not use DoubleSpace or any other disk compression scheme! This severely slows down your hard disk.

Turn off screen savers and do not connect to a local area network.

Most professionals capture video and audio separately. This allows them to “lay down” the audio track on top of the video tracks while editing. Capturing video separately will increase the performance of your video captures.

There are several hard disks on the market which are designed for higher performance video captures. These drives use 1:1 interleaving and track caching to eliminate gaps caused by a hard disk drive seeking to the next track. They are available with both IDE and SCSI interfaces.

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