why are my output files so huge?

[nikkoforever]

I have a Panansonic DV camera. Using the firewire and DV-AVI output option at the highest setting, 1 hour of video that I shot turned into 14 GB AVI file. Is that normal? Or is there some setting I need to change? Any ideas? [/u]

[charvelzeppelin]

Yeah, it's sounds normal. Then you should convert to something like xvid using virtual dub and it will reduce the file size by something like 80% or so.

[upshot]

Um... huffyuv will produce around 30GB per hour... so your file is relitively "small"....

You could realtime mpeg encode and get around 2GB per hour with mainconcept...

[MpegEncoder]

I have a Panansonic DV camera. Using the firewire and DV-AVI output option at the highest setting, 1 hour of video that I shot turned into 14 GB AVI file. Is that normal? Or is there some setting I need to change? Any ideas? [/u]

This is normal. Why did you think that it wasn't?

[nikkoforever]

I have a Panansonic DV camera. Using the firewire and DV-AVI output option at the highest setting, 1 hour of video that I shot turned into 14 GB AVI file. Is that normal? Or is there some setting I need to change? Any ideas? [/u]

This is normal. Why did you think that it wasn't?

Because I'm a newbie, probably. I just figured how am I gonna fit two hours on 1 DVD when all a DVD can hold is 4.7GB. I didn't realize the files could/should be compressed to such an extreme amount.

[MpegEncoder]

I have a Panansonic DV camera. Using the firewire and DV-AVI output option at the highest setting, 1 hour of video that I shot turned into 14 GB AVI file. Is that normal? Or is there some setting I need to change? Any ideas? [/u]

This is normal. Why did you think that it wasn't?

Because I'm a newbie, probably. I just figured how am I gonna fit two hours on 1 DVD when all a DVD can hold is 4.7GB. I didn't realize the files could/should be compressed to such an extreme amount.

Well now you know that that's what MPEG is all about. But really, try doing the math. Your camcorder is doing 720x480 by approximately 30fps. Each pixel is 3 bytes, so each frame would require 720x480x3 bytes (1,036,800). Now that's just one frame and that's only video (you probably want audio also). So one second of video only would be ~32M. That's also why I keep reminding folks that DV-AVI is NOT uncompressed.

[tweedledee]

I transfer with powervcr to mpeg 2, which is dvd compliant, and then use TMPG author to burn dvd. It depends how fussy you are about quality.