to save videos on your computer and keep good quality on every one of those files, you will need to use video transcoding tricks.
What is video transcoding? This include using codecs and audio compression as well. To optimize the file size of your videos, we will have to separate the two streams found in such files; let’s start by analyzing the video stream.
Regarding video compression, the best containers to use are AVI, WMV, and MKV — we will not suggest the MPEG-1 format, which is used in VCDs, because this compression container is not very efficient. The video quality is not that great, but if you prefer this container to encode your videos with you, you are more than welcome to do so.
The AVI video stream can be optimized by using either the DivX or Xvid codec to increase the quality and compression of your video file; you will need a bit rate calculator to find out the file size after using a specific bitrate; this calculation also takes into account the audio compression that you will use, if the bit rate calculator that you use doesn’t include the audio stream you can assume that an MP3 audio file will range between 50 to 100 MB for an hour and a half movie, if you are planning to store this video in a CD this means that you will have between 600 MB to use for the video stream.
If you have captured an hour and a half of video using your camcorder, you can set the video bit rate at around 900 to 1100 kbps and your MP3 file at 128 kbps. We should be good enough to produce a file close to 700 MB; this particular file size is also optimal if you want to keep your videos on your hard drive.
If you have 100 GB of hard drive space, you can store around a lot of movies, to keep a lifetime of memories you have captured using your camcorder. WMV and MKV are other very efficient video containers to use to maximize the quality of your files and reduce their size; however, if you decide to use the MKV or Matroska container, you will have to download a particular video player such as video Lan or VLC.