I've been taking a lot of video on my Sony T200 point&shoot. It takes decent video and I believe it's MPEG-4 or whatever the proprietary Sony word is for it... in any case, they're .mov files. A 5minute clip is like 700mb or something crazy.

I've also been doing an absurd amount of homework on the Aiptek style minicamcorders and am about the push the button on one of those... which will necessitate couple new external harddrives... but anyways...

How do I get this **** down to something manageable for storage and emailing.

 

super converter. it does EEEEEEEEEEEVERYTHING.

sorry, the website is annoying.

the interface is also annoying.

but it will do all the **** you need. and then some. times a jillion.

SUPER © .

 

The video compressor in point-n-shoot still camera that have a video function is generally not very efficient, or set to a very low level. Once you move to a dedicated video camera like the Aiptek, you'll be seeing much smaller file sizes.

Of course, if you are editing then input file size is moot relative to output file size. You need XviD.

 

Windows movie maker. Fast, efficient, brain dead simple.