If I choose to capture the video off a VHS tape to my hard drive, how much drive space do I really need to do the encoding during the DVD burn? I've got 35 GB of free drive space and it looks like my .avi files will be about 24 GB each. Do I need to have a certain amount of temporary scratch space for the encoding to occur in?

Yes...

Slapping 24gb to the hard drive then encoding it to a image file 4.3gb or 7.9gb all on your operating system drive, with 35 GB of free drive space?

If your going to do video work I would install another hard drive and change the defaults from the Roxio program to that drive..

Keep the least amount of data on the OS drive, let the operating system and programs have the space and keep it defraged.

Doing it all on one drive/partition will fragment the operating system drive to death. IMO that's when folks have problems with the PC and the program!

I would capture DV avi 720 x 480 then encode it to DVD. Roxio encodes it at one hour in time to a single layer 4.7gb DVD, or two hours to a Dual Layer 8.5gb DVD..

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A couple more numbers to digest:

V2D Capture Size:
DV = 12.8 GB/Hr (AVI)
DV HQ = 3.45 GB/Hr (mpeg2)

The AVI is uncompressed and captures easier, is more tolerant of editing and re-editing and it even edits faster.

MPEG2 is smaller but lacks all of the advantages of AVI.

The best idea is what cdanteek described, but try the DV HQ and the DV settings for a short test (5 minutes) and burn both to an RW disc for testing.

You can do this while you are shopping for a deal on a new HDD

Thanks for the good advice. I really should get another drive but in the meantime I'm curious if the encoding will next any extra space for it's process......

I thought I answered that once, Yes...

Your operating system needs swap file space too and you can't defrag your hard drive when its to full..

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Thanks for the info. I do appreciate the help and guidance with my beginers issues. Last night I captured a VHS tape that created an .avi file of about 21GB. I had about 12GB free space left on my drive. I put a blank DVD in and did a burn of the .avi file. The burn got to about 71% and stopped. I'm sure it's probably that I either had too little hard drive space or the fact that I've only got 1GB of ram in my system (please don't laugh - times are tough). Thanks again for the help!

Are you planning to do any editing of your captured video? If not then you could capture to mpeg2 video. This will give you much smaller sized files and should easily burn to DVD since it should be in the format required by the DVD.
Be advised though that a 4.7GB DVD will only hold 60 minutes of video at best quality. 60 minutes of captured video in avi format is about 12-14 GB; since you have 21GB you have almost 2hours of video which will not fit on the DVD using the High Quality setting. If you want to capture longer times then you will have to choose a lower quality setting.

BTW, 1GB of RAM is just fine and has no effect on captured file sizes.