| If you want to be able to save a lot of videos in your | | | | MB to use for the video stream. |
| hard drive and keep good quality on each and every | | | | If you have captured an hour and a half of video using |
| one of those files then you will need to use some | | | | your camcorder you can set the video bit rate at |
| video transcoding tricks which include the use of | | | | around 900 to 1100 kbps and your MP3 file at 128 kbps |
| codecs and audio compression as well. In order to | | | | we should be good enough to produce a file which is |
| optimize the file size of your videos we will have to | | | | close to 700 MB, this particular file size is also optimal if |
| separate the two streams found in such files, let's start | | | | you want to keep your videos on your hard drive. |
| by analyzing the video stream. | | | | If you have 100 GB of hard drive space you will be |
| When it comes to video compression the best | | | | able to store around 142 movies which should be good |
| containers to use are: AVI, WMV and MKV -- we are | | | | enough to keep a lifetime of memories that you have |
| not going to suggest the MPEG-1 format which is used | | | | captured using your camcorder. Other very efficient |
| in VCDs because the compression used by this | | | | video containers to use in order to maximize the |
| container is not very efficient and the video quality is | | | | quality of your files and reduce the size of them are |
| not that great, but if you prefer this particular container | | | | WMV and MKV however, if you decide to use the |
| to encode your videos with you or more than | | | | MKV or Matroska container you will have to download |
| welcome to do so. | | | | a special video player such as video Lan or VLC. |
| The AVI video stream can be optimized by using | | | | Please note that we have not suggested the use of |
| either the DivX or Xvid codec in order to increase the | | | | MPEG-2 due to the fact that such container requires a |
| quality and compression of your video file, you will | | | | very high bit rate in order to maintain video quality |
| need a bit rate calculator in order to find out the file | | | | which sacrifices the file size, the average size of a 1 1 |
| size after using a certain bitrate, this calculation also | | | | 2 hour recording using the MPEG-2 container would |
| takes into account the audio compression that you will | | | | require an average bit rate of 4000 kbps which will |
| use, if the bit rate calculator that you use doesn't | | | | take close to 5 GB of space for a single file, as you |
| include the audio stream you can assume that an MP3 | | | | can see this file size is not very friendly unless you're |
| audio file will range between 50 to 100 MB for an hour | | | | planning to burn the resulting video file into a DVD or |
| and a half movie, if you are planning to store this video | | | | high-density Blu-ray disc. |
| in a CD this means that you will have between 600 | | | | |