I now have directory full of 1gb clips.
I just want the entire capture in one giant file.

How to do that?

Try using dvgrab on the command line instead?

http://linux.die.net/man/1/dvgrab

http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/man/man1/dvgrab.1.html

edit

Hello, sdowney717

Have a look here:

http://fr.lprod.org/wiki/doku.php/video:dvgrab

Connect your video camera to Firewire first

and type this command in terminal :

sudo dvgrab --timestamp --size 0 --format dv2 your file name

would this be quicker to capture than using kino?

Yes, I'd say so. Back when I used Kino, I did all DV captures via dvgrab on the CLI, when I moved to HDV used it then instead of kdenlive. Low overhead, simple and quick. Finish a capture, hit cursor key in terminal brings up dvgrab capture command, quick edit filename to capture, insert next tape, go again.

I am currently doing something different on render.
Which may not be good idea.
Render to an NTFS folder instead of EXT4 folder. files are in NTFS and rendering back to NTFS same folder.

Putting all 20 1 gb clips together in editor, trim off emtpy space
The machine grinds down to almost unusable, it uses up all the memory 8gb ddr3 ram then eats 2.8gb into a 4gb swap partition and I think it may crash.

Would doing this on an ext4 folder be differnt? I had no trouble rendering large 26gb single file from and onto ext4

picture showing this memory disaster.

Might be able to put
size 0
or
size=0

into the dvdgrab extra parameters.

Right now I can not test it. For some reason kdenlive is refusing to connect the handycam while it did connect before.???
Even a reboot failed to make capture work. it simply does nothing when you click the connect button.

So doing another capture using kino.

I had to kill the render as it finally crashed twice due to out of memory. If you try and string together 26 1gb clips in the editor and render it, the time wil run for hours and the memory exceeds what I have.

If I simply load one huge 26gb file, make simple edits, then it renders in about 30 minutes.
memory only goes to 2gb usage.