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  1. Member
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    Hey everyone, I have a Cannon DV camera that stores the video on mini DV tapes. I've had it for about a year and when I first got it I transfered the video from the camera to the PC via the firewire cable. (I may have used WinDV, not sure as it was a while ago )

    Anyway, the transfering part is not a problem, I was just wondering what would be the best video format to save the files to the harddrive that would be a good balance between file size and compression. I would like to archive it on the HDD but be able to go back and edit it in the future. I have a file on the HDD that I transfered a while ago and it is one hour long but it's 13GB! That's just crazy talk! Strangely AVIcodec tells me:

    12.99 GB (1020 MB), duration: 1:01:15, type: AVI, 1 audio stream(s), quality: 73 %
    Video : 347 MB, 792 Kbps, 29.970 fps, 720*480 (4:3), dvsd = Sony Digital Video, Supported
    Audio : 672 MB, 1536 Kbps, 48000 Hz, 2 channels, 0x1 = PCM, Supported

    and GSpot tells me:

    Note: 7.98 GB unneeded bytes at end of file
    DV Type 2 AVI
    Multipart OpenDML AVI (5 parts)
    (110149 frames in first part, -2 frames follow)

    So it looks like I saved it as an .avi in a format that is huge and bloated. (If someone could expain why this file is so big that would be great too!)

    But, I guess what I am looking for is something that is comperable to .flac or .shn for audio or .tiff for images, an efficent lossless compression format.

    Thanks for reading and sorry for being so long winded :P

    ~crawly
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  2. Member olyteddy's Avatar
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    13 GB per hour is about right for DV. That's mostly because every frame is an I frame which makes it pretty easy to edit. The best way to back it up is to simply leave it on the tape. If you want to store a copy on your PC there are lots of formats you can use. MPEG2 is good in that it is still editable, and runs about 2 GB per hour in good quality and is easy to convert to DVD. DivX (or XviD) is good because a lot of standalone DVD players can play AVIs in these formats and it looks good at about 1 GB per hour. H.264 can look good at about 500 to 800 MB per hour but takes a lot of CPU power to encode and decode. AFAIK there are several iPod like devices that can play this format.
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  3. Member edDV's Avatar
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    Best archive format is DV-AVI as transferred. Next best is high bitrate MPeg2.
    Recommends: Kiva.org - Loans that change lives.
    http://www.kiva.org/about
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  4. Member
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    Ah, okay... So it looks like the 13GB file I have on the HDD is not really that strange after all. I take it that this file is the DV-AVI format that edDV mentioned, and this would be the highest quality. Am I correct on this?

    My situaltion is this:

    My wife is a singer/songwriter and so the tapes are filled with all sorts of stuff I have filmed to make music videos from. I want to not so much archive it as to have it available as a library of segments and clips to later edit together. Actual archiving, like olyteddy said, would probably be best to just leave it on the tape and keep them as "master tapes".

    Do you think there is much of a visual quality difference between the DV-AVI format and a high bitrate MPEG2, or enough to justify 13GB/hour vs. 2GB/hour?

    Thank you for your thoughts.
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  5. Member edDV's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by crawly
    Ah, okay... So it looks like the 13GB file I have on the HDD is not really that strange after all. I take it that this file is the DV-AVI format that edDV mentioned, and this would be the highest quality. Am I correct on this?

    My situaltion is this:

    My wife is a singer/songwriter and so the tapes are filled with all sorts of stuff I have filmed to make music videos from. I want to not so much archive it as to have it available as a library of segments and clips to later edit together. Actual archiving, like olyteddy said, would probably be best to just leave it on the tape and keep them as "master tapes".

    Do you think there is much of a visual quality difference between the DV-AVI format and a high bitrate MPEG2, or enough to justify 13GB/hour vs. 2GB/hour?

    Thank you for your thoughts.
    Yes. If you intend to edit, keep them DV format. If you just want to view, MPeg2 ~8Mb/s will be close for quality. Keep the original tapes for backup.
    Recommends: Kiva.org - Loans that change lives.
    http://www.kiva.org/about
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