Mini DV Video compression reduction using Windows media player?

Question

Hi

How much would a 10Gig AVI video on a Mini DV tape be reduced by, once windows media player publishes it to my desktop?

What is the best way to reduce the file size apart from editing out footage?

Thanks

Answer 1

Eh, 10GB, the system shouldn't compress it further.

WIth that size of file you DO NOT want to save it to your desktop.

The best advice is to capture in small chunks as this will make editing easier for the PC, the second advice is to save these clips to a second hard drive other than the main system drive.

The compression really depends on where you are going to view it.    The Apple Quicktime Pro key is a bargain at £20 and opens up the door to H264 & MPEG4 compression.

Can you tell us if it is for archival or for viewing on a telly or for web?

Archival: save back to tape once edited.

Telly:  Burn it to DVD through Nero or something similar, it will automatically compress it to MPEG2

Web:  Flash is popular, but endcoders are expensive, check what the site itself stipulates.

Answer 2

There's no straight answer to that question.  Windows Movie Maker (not Media Player) can use many different codecs to encode the video, and most of them have settings which will affect the size of the output file.  If you use the default settings and save as a WMV file it should come out at around 0.6Gbyte.