Video compression question

wellman

The files coming off my Digital8 (yes, a digital dinosaur) are AVIs, measuring about 13GB per hour. As these pile up waiting for me to process them into priceless family memories, this puts quite a strain on my household PC. Is there a decent format I can convert these AVIs to without too much fidelity loss that will still play nice with Windows Movie Maker or Adobe Premiere when it comes time to edit?

I know this is kind of like asking whether it's OK to convert a TIFF to a JPEG before working on it, but most hard-drive cams are recording in a compressed format anyway, so I'm guessing there must be some good codecs.

Thanks for the help.

Sheaf

wellman wrote:

The files coming off my Digital8 (yes, a digital dinosaur) are AVIs, measuring about 13GB per hour. As these pile up waiting for me to process them into priceless family memories, this puts quite a strain on my household PC. Is there a decent format I can convert these AVIs to without too much fidelity loss that will still play nice with Windows Movie Maker or Adobe Premiere when it comes time to edit?

I know this is kind of like asking whether it's OK to convert a TIFF to a JPEG before working on it, but most hard-drive cams are recording in a compressed format anyway, so I'm guessing there must be some good codecs.

Thanks for the help.

You might want to step a bit carefully here. AVI is not really a video encoding format, but rather a container format that contains multiple codecs. So it might be worthwhile to figure out exactly which codec was used to encode your video, as that can be more important than the container format. I don't know enough about that software to suggest an alternate format though.

Still, just as with photos, there will be some data loss if it is encoded into a different format. Data storage keeps getting cheaper and cheaper, so you might want to look into simply hosting them online with a service like Amazon's S3 or your own external drives.

wellman

Sheaf wrote:

You might want to step a bit carefully here. AVI is not really a video encoding format, but rather a container format that contains multiple codecs. So it might be worthwhile to figure out exactly which codec was used to encode your video, as that can be more important than the container format. I don't know enough about that software to suggest an alternate format though.

Still, just as with photos, there will be some data loss if it is encoded into a different format. Data storage keeps getting cheaper and cheaper, so you might want to look into simply hosting them online with a service like Amazon's S3 or your own external drives.

Hmmm... Up to now I've been using Windows Movie Maker to to the import, and the uncompressed AVI files have been the format for DVI-NTSC. So I guess it must be a Microsoft codec in that AVI. I'm just getting into Premiere Elements. It may pull the video off in a different format. I'll check into it. Thanks.