I have a digital camcorder that I bought with the idea of being able to share videos over the net. After I bought it I found out that you need a capure device to transfer the video to your computer. So I bought Pinnacle Studio version 9. Now that does transfer the video from my camcorder, but the files are HUGE. I captured a 4 minute video on the lowest quality setting and it is 75 MB. A 20 minute video in the highest quality is 4 GB. Both files are just too big. Does anyone know of a way to reduce the size of the videos, or does anyone have any suggestions on something else to buy? The quality is good, and the program can do some pretty cool things, but due to the size is not pratical. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I have a good idea for that one. First go to www.divx.com (http://www.divx.com) and download their codec package and install it.

Next, download the free program named "DVDx" from this site:
http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/downloads/dvdx.html

You can not only rip DVDs with it, but also load in almost every mpeg or movie file and "re-code" them again with a much better codec, for instance with Divx.

Install it and reboot your computer and enjoy. http://www.gixxer.com/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Karl

With Pinnacle, it captures the video as a raw format(AVI). What you should do is capture it, then compress it down to a WMV, MPG, MOV or other video format. But it is normal to capture them at a high file size. Once they are compressed, you can remove the old raw video. If you want to capture the stuff painlessly, then Windows Movie maker could capture it and compress it to WMV easily.

Yeah it saved it as AVI (54 MB file) then converted it to MPEG format and it increased in size. I will try Windows movie maker.