Most cost effective way to store minidv video?

[Todd3353]

I have a minidv camcorder and am going to use it to record my music lessons. At some point, I hope to offer parents the ability to download there child's lessons from the Internet, but right now I am doing as a security precaution for the school where I teach. What is the most cost effective and least time consuming way to compress and store all this video?

[redwudz]

Probably a set top DVD recorder with DV input.

Otherwise you would have to transfer the DV to a computer, then encode it to a more compact format.

And welcome to our forums.

[mk2006]

I keep all my MiniDVs on the original tapes to preserve the original quality. The tapes aren't much more expensive than DVDRs. Your next best option as far as quality is DVD (MPEG2) format. You can go from 24GB to 4GB with almost no loss in quality. However, if you want people to download your videos and presumably watch on computer, then you'll need to convert them to AVC (best) or Divx/Xvid format. However, quality will suffer because you'll need to deinterlace. As far as time consumption, nothing is quick. You are looking at hours, albeit most of it unattended. If I were in your shoes, I probably would offer parents the DVD version and ask them to pay a nominal fee to cover expenses.

[Todd3353]

Can you record live with a camcorder while sending the signal to a dvd recorder at the same time?