digital video file size ???

[stu]

Why when I download my video onto pc do I use 250 megs per minute of video when I can download 10 megs from the net and get 1 minute of video?

How do I compress my files so they dont take up so much room in win 98???

[Prospero]

How are you getting the video into your pc? Are you using a digital input like fire wire or are they composite connections like on a dvd player or vcr? What your going to have to do, is render to a different bit rate and possibly another compression format. How you do that depends on the way you are getting your video into the pc.

[techs]

actually that sounds somewhere in the neighborhood of what you should get(taking into account different sampling rates, etc). A movie fits on a DVD at 7.5 gigs max. but without compression you could only get 10 minutes or so. MPEG(motion pictures experts group)is a very powerful compression format for video. i think DVD movies are in MPEG2. You need to get some compression program if you hope to get a full movie on a hard drive(once again movies on DVD(single side)max 7.5gb).

[stu]

I have a pyro firewire card that I download through.

It does give me various options in terms of formats AVI, MPEG etc but I've tried them all and still am getting large files.....

[Prospero]

There arent to many programs that can deal with digital video directly yet, what compression formats does it give for avi? If you can compress to something virtualdub can deal with I would go that route, and render to MPEG4. It takes up less space than most other formats with good quality. Keep in mind, avi is just a file wrapper for whatever compression you are using.

[stu]

ok i really dont no much about this how do i go about rendering to mpeg4 .........

[Prospero]

What mpeg compression does (all forms) is compress based off change in subsequent frames, from keyframes. To do this, you need a program that can do two things. It needs to be able to read your current file format and compression, plus be able to change that compression and or file format to mpeg avi. Your camera should have come with some form software to edit videos on your computer, and may be able to handle the rendering. The way to make sure you have the codecs for mpeg4, is to install windows media tools and encoder from microsoft. These are available free for download. I have never looked at it, but a codec for dv is available here http://www.mainconcept.de/products/dvcodecWin.shtml
You might be able to use your digital files with other software with a proper codec installed. I would definitely check up on it before shelling out any money for it though. A good program for rendering to other formats is VirtualDub. It is free and can be found here http://www.geocities.com/virtualdub/
It's quite fast at encoding, and has many filters available to clean up your video and change things. As far as learning the in's and out's, a few places to check out. http://www.dvdoctor.net/cgi-bin/ultimate.cgi http://forums.matroxusers.com/cgi-bin/forumdisplay.cgi?action=topics&forum=Desktop+Video&number=2&DaysPrune=5&LastLogin= http://www.videoguys.com/
Also check out the newsgroup rec.video.desktop.
I'll try to help with what I can, but all my experience is with analog sources, not digital.