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How can I reduce the size of videos from my video camera but will not reduce the quality?

Whenever I upload videos from my video camera (mini-DV) a 1 hour video occupies so much space (around 24GB). I cannot burn that much in one DVD of which has only around 4.7GB capacity. How can I convert the video to something smaller without reducing the quality so that this 1 hour video can fit in 1 DVD.

Public Comments

1. Not possible. ANY compresion you do will put in a certain amount of distortion. There is no way around it. The computer either has all of the information for a frame or it doesn't.
2. 24 gig is a boatload for a one hour video. But anyways, if you have windows movie maker, import it, then click "save to my computer" under the file menu. Then do all the stuff and then you should see a screen that lets you choose the size. This might or might not reduce the quality. I have seen it not reduce the quality in 1 gig conversions but not with about 20.
3. if you have some dvd authoring software it should be able to convert it to DVD encoding format so you can fit 1 to 2 hours on a dvd. You can use Microsoft media encoder (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx) to encode your file differently. different encoder will be differently able at compressing data with more or less loss. the encoding used on DV tapes (20 minutes for 4 GB) is not very good compares to the one used on DVD ( 1, 2, or 4 hours for 4.7 GB) or divx (about 700 MB for 90 minutes).
4. Once you've edited your video you'll need to encode it as MPEG-2 - the standard for DVD. Your editing / authoring app should be able to do this, possibly without even telling you. There will be some reduction in quality, but you may not notice it - it'll be most noticeable where you've got a lot of movement, lighting changes and detail.