old camcorder footage - help

[AHarvey]

Hey,

I am slowly transferring old camcorder footage over to the PC, they come over and are saved as .avi but a 60 min tape is coming in just over 12gb in size so obviously i need to edit it all and slim them down a little.

Windows movie maker saves them as .wavs and takes a 280mb 720p file down to 94mb 1080p file but it still seems stupidly high for 1 min 21 seconds of footage.

Any advice on methods or software to use?

 

[Nexus]

The figure for an hour seems pretty much spot on for the file size you will get ingesting old PAL VHS tapes, which isn't much different to mini-DV footage file sizes. It's actually quite small file sizes compared to higher definition digital recording sources these days when ingesting.

Any reason why you are upscaling them to 1080?
And have you actually transcoded the footage to progressive? As when ingesting its most likely going to be interlaced footage given the source, so it will be 720i not 720p.

Ultimately you are either going to have to use editing or transcoding software to downsize them to another codec if your intention is just to keep them as a digital file to watch. Something like H.264 is a good codec for quality and fair size.

 

[Magic_x_uk]

i did the same a couple of years ago and i too had 30-50 GB of data from about 10 old camcorder tapes.

I think I used windows movie maker, it compressed it down and you then could choose how you wanted it to be saved, ie for dvd burning etc. Took a while to do, but did the job.

It could have been nero though i used, i forget.

 

[SourChipmunk]

I use Handbrake for final conversion and select the "High Profile" preset with no modifications. Seems to be a great all-around conversion for every format.