I have been capturing video from my digital camera (using Premiere Pro) as AVI files. As noted in many other forums these files are quite large. For example, I have one clip which is about 18 seconds and it is 65,000 KB. I would like to do two things with these videos which are almost entirely home movies. I would like to archive them and I would like to keep them on my HD for easy access by my wireless media server (D-Link DSM-320). I don't have any objection to saving them on DVDs for archives but it will take many of them. My first question is: can I recode them so that the files are smaller but in a way that I will not notice any loss in quality on my "non-HDTV"? I know that changing formats can cause a loss of information but at what point does it matter? Is there a way to convert video from AVI to AVI but have control over certain "parameters" (I don't speak the language of video, sorry) so that only the minimum amount of data is saved as required by one's video viewing capabilities? Thanks!
