What should I do with these digicam AVI files? Batch to WMVs?

[bengance]

I have a Canon SD 700 IS digital camera that I use as my primary camcorder for our kids due to its small size. Video is recorded as AVI files, 640x480 at 30 fps, NTSC.

The quality is generally pretty good, but suffers in indoor or low lightning, natch. The main issue I have with this is the file size of AVI's. A 30 second clip is about 65mb. Its not terribly a lot, but with the amount of files we have started to accumulate, its starting to add up.

Does anyone have recommendations on an easy way to pair these file sizes down?

Using Windows Movie Maker & Windows Media Audio 9.2 VBR Quality 90, 48 kHz, stereo 1-pass VBR, I saw a file decrease about 536% (6.38mb to 1.08mb).

Here is what I'm looking for:

1. Preservation of Quality
2. Future Usability (a file format that doesn't require some obscure codec in 10 years)
3. Easy of Conversion (i.e., batch please!)

Can anyone make any recommendations? For video editing I have Windows Movie Maker Vista and Nero 7 Ultra on my machine right now.

Thanks!

[guns1inger]

If you are happy with the quality from WMV, have a look at Microsoft's free Windows Media Encoder. It is a batching front end to WMV and will help you streamline your encoding.

The biggest issue with WMV at the moment however it the fact that it is restricted to pretty much your PC or a Zune.

For that reason, you might consider Xvid instead. You should be able to get comparable or better quality for the same file sizes, and also get playback on any of the many Xvid capable set top players.