DV AVI

[Yoeri]

Is there an easy way to backup captured video (40Gb) ?

Can I convert the DV AVI to a smaller format without quality loss, in order to write everything to a couple of DVD's (as backup) ?

What do I need for this and how do I do it ?

Thanks a lot for the help ...

Yoeri

[Richard_G]

If you compress to a smaller size you WILL lose quality. By compressing you are throwing away some of the data and, once gone, you'll never get it back. The only way of keeping the quality would be to leave it as DV .avi. Your best bet for backing up would be to output it through Firewire back to your camcorder and save it on DV tape.

[tmh]

Here's what I do with my DV home movies. Because watching a DVD is so much easier than watching the video from the tape (Set chapters, FAST forward, no waires to connect if you have a DVD player, etc) I am willing to have a small quality loss (barely noticable or not at all) in the conversion.

The added benefit to this is that with a little more work, you can edit out all the boring crap that you never want to watch again and set up "chapter" points named for the clip they represent so watching what you want is easy.

However, rather than discuss how this is done when you may already know, I'll just stop there and see if i was even close to what you were asking about. Maybe your end use is totally different.