Captured video huge in size

[Zooropean]

Hello all.

I have a Sony DCR-HC26 camcorder and for the first time I'm using Windows Live Movie Maker to capture the recording (Windows 7), which in turn, uses the official Sony driver for my camera. I have already re-captured 3 older tapes and the results are obviously better compared to the Roxio software on my old XP computer.

The problem is that for a movie which is 60-62 minutes long I end up with an avi file 12-13 Gigs in size. Of course the quality is better but from my experience it's not justified to be this big. 2-3 Gigs would probably be enough for each hour long video. Also, Movie Maker doesn't give me any options on the final output (size, format, HD, etc).

Does anyone know if there is a way to change to change this? Or if not, can you suggest a free software for 7 that does the job?

Thanks,

Zooropean

[guns1inger]

DV AVI requires 13 GB per hour of footage. Once you have edited the footage you can compress it down to something smaller, however compressed video is much harder to edit, and repeated compression reduces quality very quickly. Keep it DV until you are finished with your editing.

Under Save As you have a small selection of formats for output. You can probably create more profiles with MediaEncoder (See Papa John's website for details).

[Nelson37]

Your experience lacks depth, those files are EXACTLY the size they are supposed to be.

Read up on file formats, codecs, and compression.

[lacywest]

Well back in the day when I was using the Canopus ADVC-50 DV Converter ... I captured ... Fright Night 2 ... to my computer ... and 13 gigs an hour is about right ... the end result was ... 26 gigs

When I was capturing video from my JVC DV video cameras to my PC ... I used ... Scenalyzer Live.

[lacywest]

Maybe if your video camera has the correct outputs ... you could just connect the video / audio connections to a DVD Recorder and record to a DVD disk or to a DVD RAM disk.