Webcam video file too large (AVI)

[zerozenones]

Hey guys - So my problem is the following - I'm taking short clips with my laptop's webcam, some of wich I wish to keep but file sizes are simply absurd. A 3 minute clip for example gives me a file that is 1.2Gb. The format is AVI, the codec is YUY2 (that's what Gspot is giving me anyway). Webcam is Acer Crystal Eye on an Aspire 7740G-6969.

This was only an minor storage problem so far but now I've tried uploading the clip to youtube and it was all out of sync when it got there and I cant help but think it's related to the size (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdBbvYGR3aY).

What can I do to the file to end up with something more reasonable in size?

Thanks

[edDV]

1.2 GigaByte or 1.2 Gigabit (150 MB) for 3min?

Even if Gigabit, that is 3GB per hour about DVD rate.

Try Mediainfo and copy the full view as text report.

[zerozenones]

Here goes:

General
Complete name : C:\Users\100110\Videos\crickets.avi
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
Format profile : OpenDML
File size : 1.15 GiB
Duration : 3mn 9s
Overall bit rate : 52.0 Mbps

Video
ID : 0
Format : YUV
Codec ID : YUY2
Codec ID/Info : YUV 4:2:2 as for UYVY but with different component ordering within the u_int32 macropixel
Duration : 3mn 9s
Bit rate : 50.5 Mbps
Width : 640 pixels
Height : 480 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
Frame rate : 15.000 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:2
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 10.969
Stream size : 1.12 GiB (97%)

Audio
ID : 1
Format : PCM
Format settings, Endianness : Little
Format settings, Sign : Signed
Codec ID : 1
Codec ID/Hint : Microsoft
Duration : 3mn 9s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 1 411.2 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 31.9 MiB (3%)
Interleave, duration : 501 ms (7.52 video frames)

[edDV]

That is uncompressed 640x480 4:2:2 video at a 15 fps rate.

Video bit rate is 50.5 Mb/s.

Audio is uncompressed 44.1 KHz PCM (CD quality) at 1.4112 Mb/s.

So this is very high quality uncompressed audio and video, but at only 15 fps rate. You could compress it down ~40x with h.264 encoding but it would still look a bit choppy due to the 15 fps rate.

Note that even though the video format is high quality does not mean the source video has quality. That depends on the properties of the camera sensor, optics and processing.