I recently got a Panasonic NV-GS75. So I got it organised and took 40 minutes of video footage on it. When I downloaded this to my PC using the bundled 'MotionDV Studio LE for DV' it came out as a whopping 8.41 Gigs!! Now this seems an awful big .avi file for 40 minutes of tape, (isn't it?).
Have I done something wrong, because when I go to convert this to a VOB format (I use DVDSanta)? I am sure thats going to increase the size further. A normal movie of 2 HOURS can fit on a DVD.
I thought I could shoot 2 hours of footage and then convert to VOB and burn a disk.
There tends to be a misunderstanding that video transferred directly from tape is "raw" i.e. not compressed. This is not the case: it is compressed using a DV codec. The compression rate is constant and cannot be changed and results in about 13GB per hour.
When going to DVD, it will have to be encoded to MPEG-2 which can be done with DVD authoring programs (like DVD snata, Ulead DVD MovieFactory, Nero VisionExpress etc. etc.), but you will get better quality with specialized stand alone encoders (like TMPGEnc or Canopus Procoder). Depending on the bitrate that you use you will be able to get more or less material on a single layer DVD.
Here are some rough numbers:
9500 kb/s : 1 hour (perfect quality)
6500 kb/s: 90 minutes (good auality)
4800 kb/s: 2 hours (reasonable quality)
Thanks for the info, I am used to DVDSanta convrting .AVI files up to 4 times larger, so when I saw over 8 gigs for 40 minutes I started to worry!!
Anyway thanks very much for replying, one more request any advice on editing home movies, including good editing programs, (and by good I mean idiot proof!).
Well VirtualDub is good program, and it's free. Not much of an editing software, but you can use various filter and cut unnecessary material from your video. Very good for encoding videos. Best video editing software I have used is adobe premiere, it's great for home videos, or even professional use. A finnish amateur movie (http://www-fi3.starwreck.com/) was edited using premiere as far as I know. I talked with the main man behind the movie few years back, and they used premiere at least in their older productions. I think there's a low budget version of premiere for home video editing, just like adobe elements.
