Hello fellow editors!
I'm fairly uninitiated with Adobe Premiere Pro, but have edited a few projects with it. But, I've found that Adobe captures the video from my camcorder as AVI files, which are very large -- I've almost ran out of space! Is there any way to capture the files as MPEG or something smaller?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

As the saying goes," You can't have your cake and eat it too". If you want to edit the video, the avi is what you want and need. After the editing you can compress it down depending on the final use of it. If you only want to watch the video on the computer then look for a capture card that does mpeg2 directly like a Haupage card. This video however will not lend itself to editing very well.