Hey! Couple of questions. 1. I use Windows Movie Maker to download the Movies from my camcorder to my computer. I'm not sure which format to download to. Currently I'm using DV-AVI (NTSC) wich is 25.0 Mbps. It doesn't take long for a short video to take up alot of space. I'm trying to get the best quality because the grandparents have 55" Plasma TV's to watch their new granddaughter. Is there another format that would give you great quality? 2. 2nd part from above question. I only have this Sony ImageMixer CD that came with the camera. I don't think this program is worth much. Any suggestions on a different program to download the video off my camcorder with? I'm currently using Windows Movie Maker. Thanks for you help!
1. You're doing the right thing (assuming that you are using a Firewire connection for the upload). It is the best quality that you can get. 2. As long as you are doing a direct Firewire transfer, it does not make any difference which program you use. (editing and burning DVD's however is different stuff and you may want to look at some other programs).
Hey, thanks! I am using Firewire. What is still confusing is that a 2 hour movie @ 25.0 MBPS = 180,000 MB worth of data. A 2 hour Movie from Blockbuster wouldn't fit on a DVD, even a Double layer DVD. Making a movie and getting it to a computer is the easy part. But if I am trying to get video of our new daughter, I would like to save the files with the best quality that comes from our video camera. I would like to save them on my hard drive as well. It doesn't seem like I'm doing this correctly. Any help???
Your calculation is not quite correct, but never mind...;-) A 2 hour DV-compressed AVI will be around 26 GB, which is certainly too big for a DVD. DVD uses MPEG-2 compression which will take less space. If you want to burn it to a DVD you will have to feed it into a DVD authoring program which will then comprees the AVI to MPEG-2 (alternatively, you can first use a stand alone MPEG-encoder which uusually create a better quality MPEG and feed the resulting MPEG into an authoring program.) For storing and watching on PC you could use wmv.
