Am I missing something here?

Haven't posted in a while but here goes.

A little background. I'm shooting a fitness/bodybuilding show for DVD and I figured I'd shoot straight to external HDD using Vegas capture and my laptop. Save myself some tape capture time. I'm using Panasonic DVXb cams and capturing via firewire with tape backup.

My 500GB drive shows something like 30 hours available for capture. It is not partitioned, has only two main folders and most of the HDD free. No problem there.

The other HDD I'm having troubles with is partitioned into Capture and Render drives. The Capture portion has about 320 GB free and 9 main folders. But Vegas Capture shows only 1 hour and 14 minutes available to record on. I'll just use the 500GB HDD but I'm wondering why the other drive is showing so little room left even though there's over 80%/320GB available.

Any ideas?

Thanks folks.

ian

Are the partitions formatted as NTFS? I wouldn't have thought that this would affect the capture time available display, though, so it's unlikely to be your culprit I'm afraid. At least you can factor it out of your troubleshooting!

For visitors who aren't sure why the format type is important, NTFS allows for filesizes limited only by the size of the disk volume, whereas FAT32 only allows a maximum filesize of 4Gb. SD video is around 13Gb an hour, if I'm correct, so with FAT32 that gives you about 20 minutes maximum clip size (which further discounts this as Ian's problem). HD is, I think, around the 40Gb/hour mark, i.e. 6 minutes max clip size in FAT32. Feel free to correct these numbers which are dragged from the depths of my knackered brain.

"Days" are dropped in the calculation. So if you had 3 days 4 hours worth of capture time available, it will read as 4 hours.

Thanks to Edward Troxel for this reply.

And the numbers seem to work in explaining Ian's situation - 320Gb/13Gb per hour of video = just over 1 day of recording. Say 1 day 1 hour 14 minutes?!

Would this be classed as an oversight on the part of Vegas? I can't see any sensible reason to drop the days and confuse people.

My guess is that, in some way, shape or form it's related to timecode which only allows for one day.
This is an issue if you're recording "time of day" time code and it goes past midnight on the same tape, thereby starting a new day.
Most editing systems I've used give up trying to find the new time code :-(