Copying movie from my handycam TAPE to computer using Moviemaker with low disk space format i.e. wmv to avi?

Question

Using Windows movie maker, while making making movie for my home video shoot, the outpot is in mpg or wmv format. this takes around 15 mb space for 5 min. movie. Is there any way that i can record the movie in a more compressed format to accomadate big function shoot of say one hour or so?

Answer 1

here is a converter to change the format  http://www.download.com/Any-Video-Conver...    here is dvd shrink for the compression of it  

Answer 2

No - You need a bigger hard drive. You can't compress it as such, as it will turn the file quality to c**p before you have even started to edit. And if you do compress for storage you will be reducing the over all size of the video which will also affect the final viewing size - it will be too small and crappy to look at.

My suggestion would be to get a bigger 200-300GB Hardd drive for a couple of hundred $$ with a Firewire port as Firewire transfers faster than USB. Just make sure your PC has a Firewire card and port.

I would use .avi rather than wmv even though they are both pretty mediocre.

Also h.264 or mpeg is a far better codec to work with than .avi which is getting pretty old now.