Recording and posting 1:15 minutes of kids softball games? Guidance pls?

[vanhollymorgan]

Thank for any help:

Heres what I am up to. We have a girls softball team (many deployed parents). So we though we would record the softball games and upload them so parents could see the kids play ball.

We use a video camera (Hi8 Sony dcrtrv730, i know old but cheap ) . Its recording onto hi8 Tape. So am i best to use the virtual dub program to capture it through a firewire into my laptop external hard drive. When i do this i set the virtual dub to auto break it in the conversion to 2gb avi files so i can get around the fat32issue (3.99gb). After one hour of game time i end up with 10 blocks of 2gb avi files. (4:3 box by the way).

Should i then use freemake or Isoft AVCHD to convert each of those files to h.264 to make them smaller,

Then i go back and use free make or isoft to join the h.264 files?

I still think it would come out over 1 gb.

If i use free make i set it to take the smallest size i can using mp4 and doing mobile device? (Dont know thats just the smallest file i could find.)

If i can get it under 1 gb i can upload it to blip.tv and it will work in the file size there for uploads. Am I correct?

What would you guys do, am i missing something, using wrong programs, any tips or advice would be great.

The end goal is to take an hour long softball game and upload to blip and have it where its at least watchable.

Thanks!

[aedipuss]

first the cam is digital 8, not high 8. second clean off the external drive and re-format it to ntfs. then start using winDV to capture the tapes to DVavi. it will be about 13GB/tape, in a single file if the camera runs continuously, or you can have separate files for each start/stop of the tape. if you use a program like handbrake you can specify the final file size. a better choice might be youtube where you don't have to be under a certain filesize.