old camcorder footage - help

Harvey_nikon

Harvey_nikon

Suspended / Banned
Messages
3,749
Edit My Images
Yes
Hey,

I am slowly transferring old camcorder footage over to the PC, they come over and are saved as .avi but a 60 min tape is coming in just over 12gb in size so obviously i need to edit it all and slim them down a little.

Windows movie maker saves them as .wavs and takes a 280mb 720p file down to 94mb 1080p file but it still seems stupidly high for 1 min 21 seconds of footage.

Any advice on methods or software to use?
 
Anything FFMPEG based like winFF or Handbrake.
May need to look at something like: http://www.compression.ru/video/public_filters.htm too.

If you're recording at say 5 Mbps, that's 5MB every 8 seconds, so you'd be looking at 50MB for you 1min 21 sec clip. If you plan to edit, you'd probably be using DV at 5 times that bitrate ot IMX 30 at 6 times.

(12GB per hour works out at about 25 Mbps - which is about right)
 
PS Wav is an audio only format. Check you haven't ditched the video
 
Don't do any conversion before editing, you will reduce the quality of the finished movie.

Edit the movie, adding any transitions, titles, effects and use the tools in your editing programme to export to your desired format.

As ST599 pointed out, WAV is just audio.
 
Last edited:
Agreed, don't compress anything before you edit it, if you want it to be as good as it can be.
Hard drives are pretty cheap these days. Suck it up! :)
 
VLC does video conversion. I'd use that and whack it into mpeg.
 
thanks for the advice all, i'll do some editing and cropping etc.

I meant wmv files btw, no idea why I posted wav :S
 
srichards said:
VLC does video conversion. I'd use that and whack it into mpeg.
Click to expand...

Don't do this if you're going to edit it.

DV25 is the minimum quality you want for editing. You also need to be careful how you convert it as DV25 PAL is bottom field first, where as all other major codecs are top field first.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top