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Calling All Video Experts...

by garyv
6 replies
I'm looking to get a new camcorder for Christmas. I'm noticing that many of the new ones are high definition, and use a hard-drive. For example - one that I'm interested in has a 120GB hard drive.

My question is - What the heck do you do with these videos once you have them?

Where before you could simply collect tapes - How do you store these videos? At 120GB - I could buy a Terabyte hard drive, and only have room for maybe 8 or 10 videos.

Am I missing something here? Is there a way to convert or compress these videos without losing quality?

Just curious if any of you have one of these camcorders, and how you might store your videos.
#calling #experts #video
  • Profile picture of the author Derek Pankaew
    What are you using them for?

    If you're doing web video, chances are you can compress them and lose quality without much risk, since in the end web quality video is very low quality anyway.

    If you plan on making movies, that's a whole different story ...
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  • Profile picture of the author lakshaybehl
    You rcord the videos, and then move them to your computer.... And then use them wherever you have to.

    You migtht need to use Blu-Ray disks to store all the bulk. Or some 10 TB HDD's... I know they are available although I have just one 1 TB HDD.

    -Lakshay
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  • Profile picture of the author Josh Anderson
    Is there a way to convert or compress these videos without losing quality?
    No. When you compress you loose quality. However with the right codecs and software it won't be too noticeable and you can retain most of the quality.

    What software you use to convert and compress depends on what you will be doing with the video ie. archiving for personal use, burning to dvd, podcasting, publishing to the web etc.

    I store my videos on a large external hard drive.

    Other than that your question is pretty general... you will probably want to be more specific and let people know what you eventually want to do with the video content you plan on capturing so others can give you some more suggestions.
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  • Profile picture of the author garyv
    Actually - I plan on using it for mainly for home movies. So I'd like to keep as much quality as possible, but I'd also like to be able to store them.
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    • Profile picture of the author Josh Anderson
      Since you are using an HDD camera you can just copy the digital files to your computer. If they are standard avi then you can use windows movie maker or windows media encoder to compress them. Both programs are free. Search google.

      If your camera captures in avchd format you may need to find some software that is compatible with that format.
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      • Profile picture of the author garyv
        Thanks Josh - I've been using pinnacle studio ultimate 12 to convert my old home videos to DivX. And the quality seems pretty good. I can get about an hour of video on to 1GB

        Do you know much about the DivX codec? Is there a HD version of DivX?

        Originally Posted by Josh Anderson View Post

        Since you are using an HDD camera you can just copy the digital files to your computer. If they are standard avi then you can use windows movie maker or windows media encoder to compress them. Both programs are free. Search google.

        If your camera captures in avchd format you may need to find some software that is compatible with that format.
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