• Compression Techniques

  Ideas? Moving from DVD to a USB Stick

  Posted by Gary Goldblum on October 5, 2014 at 9:41 pm

  Hi,

  I do legal videography and my set up consists of a Sony DVD writer, a Panasonic camcorder, a mixing board, and a few mics. I usually send lawyers my final product on DVDs. Depositions can go from 20 minutes up to 8 hours. There is very little need to edit. Ideally I would like to hand a lawyer a USB drive with hours and hours of video that can be played on Mac or PC with very good quality. I usually shoot in SD mode, but occasionally they want HD. I am wondering if there is an easy solution to move beyond DVDs that can handle this amount of data, without having to compress the file afterwards.

  1) Is there a stand alone machine that record directly to a compressed file? (With a USB) connector? Or a camera that records in a compressed format?

  2) Is an MPEG4 a universal file that will play on both Mac and PC? Is that the best compression codec for what I am doing?

  3) Can my MacBook Pro capture in a compressed format?

  Thanks for any help.

  Gary

  Thanks!

  Gary

  Eric Strand replied 11 years, 7 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Eric Strand

  October 6, 2014 at 10:37 pm

  The only recorder I can think of quickly that can do SD and HD is the Blackmagic H264 Pro recorder but I’m not sure if your camera has HDMI or SDI out.

  https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/h264prorecorder

  If you were doing SD only maybe the El Gato recorder would work for you: https://www.elgato.com/en/video/video-capture

  H.264 codec with an .MP4 wrapper is what you want for a file type that plays both Mac and PC. Craig Seeman in this forum is really the guy to answer that question.

  USB thumb drives are cheap nowadays so that would work as a distribution device. If you have it formatted for FAT32, your max file size would be 4GB.

  @ericstrand11

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