CompuServe Messages

Brian, All of the samples I have digitized at the highest quality, I have used much too high a block rate (i.e., 290 when the largest block size needed was 251) which reduces the ultimate amount of storage available. Still, on the gigabyte drive, at a block rate of 290 and at the highest quality setting, the file sizes I have been getting would indicate that you could get almost 5 minutes on the 1 Gig drive. But, and I am not sure if this is a software problem or some real limita- tion, the PAR software for some reason limits recording time to times far less than you can ultimately store. That is, it will reduce your recording time to say 3 and a half minutes even though you eventually record 5 or 6 minutes without ever deleting any files. As far as the quality is concerned, I am VERY impressed. Keep in mind however that so far I have only digitized from VHS using the composite input and I am displaying on a composite monitor. But to my eye, even at substantially reduced quality (16 instead of 23) the output is indistinguishable from the input. And at that quality level, the drive will hold more than 8 minutes! For simple animation playback I think the times are even greater because it determines the quality level you need to represent your image on a frame by frame basis whereas in recording it always records at the quality factor you tell it. This weekend I'm going to experiment with recording S-VHS. I'll report back my findings. Terry Tabor