My videos from my video camera are HUGE

[Andre Gagnon]

[kershen] “150 megs for 40 seconds of movie!!!”

This is the result of the DV standards (

[Aanarav Sareen]

There is always going to be a trade off between file size and quality. Andre has posted some good advice below, but PRemiere Pro and Windows Movie Maker and 2 entirely different programs, aimed at different markets.

Aanarav Sareen
premiere@asvideoproductions.com

[Steven L. gotz]

If you don’t have 30GB of hard drive space, or more, for every hour of video you want to edit, you will not have a great editing experience. Not at all. Around 13GB for the capture, then about that much or more for preview files, extra audio and other resources.

Buy more, or bigger drives, or don’t take up video editing as a hobby. If it is a job for you, charge enough to buy more drives.

Steven
https://www.stevengotz.com

[Kershen]

But how do i get to lower the quality when capturing the video in PP from the video camera? All i can get is Awesome Quality which of course means big files.
They put normal quality 2 hours long movies on 1 gig, how do i get that quality for that size

[Vince Becquiot]

>>They put normal quality 2 hours long movies on 1 gig, how do i get that quality for that size.

Quality is a always a relative term. To a professional video editor, a 2 hours quality video in standard definition will not likely be under 200 GB. That said, the final format will dictate the file size.

But the “Capture and editing’ part of the process should not affect that quality. That means not recompressing in any way until you are ready Burn, etc.

Now, you mention making a 2 hours movie look good in 1 GB… First you would have to start with film, or high definition video, and not DV, which is already compressed and noisy. You would also have to make sure you don’t watch it on a broadcast monitor 😉

Cheers,

Vince

[Kershen]

So you say when my movie that contains small parts of captured 1 gig big videos is exported from premiere pro, the movie i get at the end should be a lot smaller? How? How do you lower that quality in premiere pro?

[Mike Cohen]

Not sure of the experience (years) of the original poster, but here is some history for his benefit.

In non-DV based editors, you used to capture your raw footage at a lesser or off-line quality. For example in Media 100 you can capture a whole 1 hour tape and it only takes up 1 gig. It is low quality, 1 field, but ok for an offline edit. Then when you are ready for the final edit, you batch digitize at full resolution, or up to 300kb/frame.

Well since DV takes up a modest amount of space, and now that you can get a 500gig drive for less than say a Lexus, space is not a problem.

Final delivery on DVD, DIVX, VCD, PSP etc is always compressed down to what will fit on a piece of media, thus small sizes with relatively decent quality. But generally you do not want to edit one of these delivery formats such as MPEG, DIVX etc. While youcan do, it is not the current way to do things.

This of course may change, as we used to think 3/4″ would be around forever!

Make sense?

Mike

[Kershen]

So what you are saying is DV movies are supposed to be huge but once i put it as some format such as MPEG the size is reduced?

[Steven L. gotz]

Exactly. The best example might be that an hour of DV is just under 13GB. An hour of the same video on a DVD would be just under 4.5GB. Much of that is done through temporal excoding. Meaning that not every frame has all of the information in it. Which makes MPEG2 hard to edit, but great for playing because the decoder in the DVD player can handle it just fine.

That same hour of video, when downsized to a smaller frame size and maybe half of the frame rate, can now be well under 1GB on a web site.

Steven
https://www.stevengotz.com

[Mike Cohen]

this discussion illustrates why consumer DVD camcorders are a strange invention. Even amateur moms and dads are doing rudimentary video editing nowadays, and editing DVD video is possible but not pleasurable.

Last year I had a client say “Can you recommend a good DVD camcorder?”
I replied “No”

Good luck

Mike