Hi all,

I bought a JVC video camera cause I need to recorder some classes. The thing is that a class I record takes 720 MB for an hour of recording ( I used the economy bottom in the camera.... so the classes are 2 hours so I get a file of a size of 1.44 GB which is a lot.

Is there a program to compress the file to reduce its size? ( I don't mean winzip or winrar.... I just want to shrink the file size a bit, will it hurt much the cuality of the picture?


btw,my camera creates .Mod files which I manually change the extension to .mpeg in order to view the files

Thanks a lot.

Juan

Huge file - great picture.

Medium file - ok picture.

Small file - shit picture.

The more you compress a clip the worse it will look - only you can decide what you are happy with.

My advice would be to buy more drives and store everything as biggest and best, If a thing is worth filming then surely it is worth keeping in the best state you can?

__________________
I have two prejudices - I am anti HDV for consumer camcorders, and I eat mooks who claim to be pro wedding vidders and ask dumb questions.

www.zaskarfilms.com You tube channel 'zaskarfilms'
JVC DV5001e (big cam), Sony PC6E (tiny cam), Vinten pro5, PAG light, SM58, Sony ECM50, Sony C-76, 0.5x convertors for sony, Rode video mic, Vegas 7.

Are you taping classes so that you can use the video for subsequent study sessions and review?

If so and you just want reasonable clarity or image quality then my opinion the answer to your question is - Yes!

Two simple ways to do this.
1. Use most any consumer editing program - open the file in the workspace timeline and then select a more compressed/smaller file size to render to - like VCD or SVCD or mpeg1. - Presto - you have a much smaller video file for your study purposes.
2. Use one of many free file transcoding programs - one example is mediacoder easily found via a Google search. Easy to use (sorta) and will one-step transcode your video to most any file type and size.

Final thought for this troubled world we live in be sure your professor/instructor/teacher is aware of and approves of your video taping. Most of those academics consider their lectures and presentations to be their proprietary stuff (the law seems to back them up in this) so be careful what you do with the video. Just mentioning this as now and then in the States I hear of dust ups where students share or even sell notes and recordings and find they are in trouble at University.
goodluck