Large AVI to smaller AVIs

[longlostname]

I have a collection of AVI files that are over 10GB in size. They are currently stored on a NTFS drive. I need to move them to a backup PC but that PC is Windows 98 and only has FAT32 drives. I need to take these large AVI files and break them down into smaller, segmented AVI files to store them on the FAT32 drive.
I have VirtualDub 1.7.8
I have set the following:
Video/Full Processing Mode
Audio/Full Processing Mode
Video/Compression/Huffyuv 2.1.1
Audio/Compression/Microsoft ADPCM 48 kHz, 4 bit, Stereo
File/Save segmented AVI/File Segment size limit in MB: 2000

I need to be able to later edit these files in Premier Pro v7.0.

Am I doing this correctly? Are there better codec choices to make for this purpose? Can I get some suggestions/feedback on this?

Thanks

[poisondeathray]

I'm assuming that you have enough space on your backup HD, and that the only reason you have to break them down is FAT32

I would approach this differently. I would just use archive software like winrar or winzip to segment the AVI files into 1GB chunks. The benefit of this is you can re-assemble them in original format without having to re-encode (or even as uncompressed using even more space), and there is even crc error checking

You can use no compression if you want (store mode) and the speed is very fast.

Another easy freeware option is HJ-split

[guns1inger]

If the files are DV avi (g-spot can confirm this) then you can use virtualdub (latest version) in Direct Stream Processing mode to cut the files into smaller than 4GB chunks without re-encoding. Will take a couple of minutes per file. This is by far the best option.

[longlostname]

guns1inger and poisondeathray,

Thank you very much for the very quick replies to my question.

poisondeathray,

Thank you for the option of using WinRAR. For general backup, this is a very applicable method. I don't have to be concerned with which codec to use or the potential for losing image quality. I will use this right now for my file backup.

Now, if I was to want to standardize any of my existing or new video files so that they will from now on always fit on a FAT32 drive, can anyone refer me to some documentation that perhaps describes how to handle video files that are too big to fit on a FAT32 drive? I would like a procedure that, for example, specifies how to take a 10 GB AVI video file and break it down into 2 GB segments while still minimizing the loss of image quality. I am thinking that the process I described previously with VirtualDub using Huffyuv was close to what I am describing, but I would like some feedback that would discuss the advantages/disadvantages of my process. I would like to be able to break down any large AVI into smaller segments and still be able to immediately edit those segments in Premiere Pro v7.0

I hope this makes sense. Thank you very much for the help.

[guns1inger]

You would be better off getting a utility that lets you read/write NTFS from your Win98 machine.

Otherwise (and assuming you are working with DV files), use WinDV to transfer the video, and set a maximum capture size in WinDV. It will automatically segment the files as it captures so they always stay the right size.

Whereever possible you should avoid re-encoding. If you chose to re-encode using a lossless codec ike Huffyuv, understand that the total size will increase, potentially by a large amount, and therefore the number of 4 GB files you will be dealing with will also increase.

Ultimately, using Win98 and/or FAT32 doesn't make much sense any more