Just got a minidv cam and everyone says if you transfer the whole 60 mins of the tape to your pc it will be huge. But what if you transfer only like 10 mins of the tape. How big would that be, and why is it so much if you are transfering on to your pc as an avi file. Thats if there is software that lets you transfer it as an avi file.
60 minutes is 13GB, so if you only transfer 10 minutes it is going to be just a little over 2GB. These are simply the numbers that are determined in the standard DV video compression as used by miniDV camcorders. The same compression is used in your AVI if you do a direct transfer. If you wnat to make it smaller you will have to apply another compression.
You said if I wanted to make it even smaller I would have to apply another compression to it but I can only do that after it has been placed on the HD? For example, is there any software that lets you select how you want to compress it before you upload the vid to your HD. I manily want small clips to keep on the pc or cds. I am not wanting to burn the vids to dvds.
Yes, that is possible but it depends on what program you use. If you use Microsoft Moviemaker for example you can capture directly to wmv and many programs can also directly capture to mpeg-1 and/or mpeg-2 or using any codec installed on your system (e.g. divX). However, this is not the preferred method because compressing video is a rather CPU consuming process and can therefore only be done with relative low quality encoder settings. By the way: you should first ask yourself how you want to distribute and store your clips and then select the appropriate compression method.
