Video Help

[Lexluethar]

No real section for video camera help

We have a Handycam and i've been taping stuff over the past few months. I've filled up two taps and purchase an i-link cable to transfer the video over to my laptop so i can reuse the video tapes, edit the videos, and hopefully send come cd/dvd's off to family and friends.

My question is i'm using Vista to import the data, and using windows movie maker to merge the different sections together and create the movies I want. I have a ton of options when exporting the video, I don't know what to choose. What the movie is imported into Windows is DV-AVI (NTSC). I assume this is the best quality i'm going to get with this camera. But I can't obviously use this setting because a 14 minute constant movie is 3.4 Gig.

So what setting should I be using? I'm going to always keep the Raw / original movies which will be in that NTSC format. Then i'll cut those movies down to their respected parts (christmas, soccer games, etc). When cutting the final movies to save to files and CD/DVD's what format should I use?

Thanks.

 

[Trotter]

Video Converter Freeware - Any Video Converter Free Version - convert video to any formats, avi to MPEG, avi to MP4, flv to MPG

Convert to something smaller, like MP4.

 

[philbar71]

i dont know if wmm will let you export to mpeg4 but that is what i use when i am making a video.

 

[Baez]

Your question would go in the Audio & Multimedia section.

Any Video Converter is an amazing program.

 

[Lexluethar]

Ya I thought about that, but mostly audio goes into that forum so i didn't post there... lesson learned

I guess with WIndows Movie Maker (i know i could / should use something else I just wanted to do it with something i already was semi-familiar with) it gives me different formats.

What bit rate do you guys usually use for your videos? It is imported in with 28.6 MPs bitrate which is the NTSC format.

WHere is the quality start to lessen noticably? I have:
-Portable media (1 mbps)
-DVD quality (3 mbps)
-DVD wide screen (3 mbps)
-HD 720p (5.9 mbps)
-HD 1080p (7.8 mbps)
-VHS (1 mbps)
-Low bandwidth (117 kbps)

I guess depending on the size of the video i'll do HD 1080p since, but if i'm not going to notice a difference since the camera isn't HD (that i know of) should i just use DVD quality.

I'm new to all this stuff.

 

[Hefemeister]

One thing I do is I never reuse tapes. I look at the tapes as my backup solution. I usually make imports at DVD quality and they look great. I will put them on DVD's for viewing and keep a copy on the computer.

By having the tapes with the info still on them I do not backup all of my video files which would take a ton of hard drive space. I figure the $3 per tape is a small price to pay.