Operation Manual

30 Pinnacle Studio 9
An MPEG movie requires much less disk space than
the equivalent full-quality DV movie, although thanks
to SmartCapture this is not generally a concern.
DV
DV is a high-resolution format with correspondingly
high storage requirements.
Your camcorder compresses and stores video on the
tape at 3.6 MB/s, at a quality equivalent to broadcast
video. With full-quality capture, the video data is
transferred directly from the camcorder tape to your PC
hard drive with no changes or additional compression.
Because the video quality is high, capturing at this
setting does consume a lot of disk space, so you may
want to pick and choose small segments to capture
instead of the entire tape.
You can calculate the amount of disk space you will
need by multiplying the length of your video in seconds
by 3.6, which gives the number of megabytes required.
For example:
1 hour of video = 3600 seconds (60 x 60)
3600 seconds x 3.6 MB/s = 12,960 MB (12.7 GB)
Hence 1 hour of video uses 12.7 GB of storage.
To capture at full quality, your hard drive must be
capable of sustained reading and writing at 4 MB per
second. All SCSI and most UDMA drives are capable
of this. The first time you initiate a full-quality capture,
Studio will test your drive to make sure it is fast
enough.
MPEG
DVD and S-VCD discs both use files in MPEG-2
format, an extension of the MPEG-1 format used for