DVD Camcorder Help

[Neutron]

I need to record my presentation for school. I'm using a Hitachi DVDCAM camcorder.

My presentation will be no longer than 7 minutes as required for my class. I will then need to transfer it to my PC and compress it somehow to get it to be under 50MB so that I can upload it to the school.

I bought a mini DVD-RW for this since this is the format the camcorder uses.

Once I make the video recording, will I need to finalize the disc before my PC will be able to read it? How do I go about converting the file to an MPEG-4 file, since I believe that's the best one to compress it to?

 

[mike123abc]

Maybe quicktime pro? It is fairly inexpensive. There are some freeware MPEG-4 encoders lying around, just a matter of what decoders you have available? QT is fairly wide spread.

 

[dfergie]

Divx or xvid are good ones... the latter being free...

 

[mike123abc]

Windows Media Encoder

Windows media encoder does a nice job, playable in the windows media player. VC-1 compression will generate small files, and it is free...

 

[Neutron]

Do I need to finalize the DVD-RW before my PC will recognize the video?

Will Windows Media Encoder be able to transfer the DVD file type to an MPEG-4 type?

 

[Ramy]

I don't think you can finalize a RW disc. I could be wrong though, but I have never had to when I have recorded on one.

 

[mastermesh]

Quick Question - if it's for a school do you have access to their labs, and if so, do they have Adobe Premiere or something on par with that???!? Make it a learning experience!

 

[Neutron]

My school is all online.

I ended up using our digital camera which records movies as Quicktime MOV files.

My 8 minute 30 second presentation ended up being 132MB.

Thanks for the help!!