Home movie files are too large : AVCHD (.m2ts) and MPEG2 (.mpg).

[doodab]

I've got this great Panasonic video camera, well I mean great for me as it's a point and shoot with full HD etc. Problem is that the HD movie is ridiculously large in file size, with 1 hour of video being over 8Gb on file. When I use the Panasonic provided software "HD Writer AE 2.0" to convert this to MPEG2 (for the less important home movies), the file is still stupidly big, 1 hour of video taking some 4.7Gb.

Is this normal?

How do I compress these files, i.e. similar to how torrented movies can be only 700Mb in size?

That's normal. It's actually smaller than the files from my old (SD) DV camera, which were about 13GB/hour. 4.7GB of MPEG2 sounds like it's designed to fit on a standard DVD, does it reduce the resolution as well?

A 700mb torrent generally isn't full HD (usually it's closer to SD) and they tend to be even smaller vertically because they throw away the black bars at the top and bottom rather than encoding them. They also reduce the size of the audio, and recompress with much lower bit rates than the source material.

To make it smaller you can:

a) reduce resolution. 1080p is 5 times the size of SD (720x576) and 720p about 2.2 times the size of SD so all other things being equal reducing resolution will result in smaller files.
b) recompress with a lower bitrate. This will effect image quality, possibly more visibly than reducing resolution depending on how low you squeeze the bit rate. Your best bet is to test various options.
c) use a different codec. H.264 as (most likely) used in the original file needs about 1/2 the bitrate of MPEG2 for the same subjective quality, so recompressing to H.264 *ought* to give better results than compressing to MPEG2 given the same bitrate.
d) Recompress the audio. It is probably quite a high bit rate as it comes out of the camera e.g. 256 or 384kbps when 128 or 192 would do.

The other option is to buy a bigger hard disk. 1TB is less than £50 now.

[d000hg]

I've been using Any Video Converter recently and been very impressed by it.

[PAH]

1 hour of video taking some 4.7Gb.

Is this normal?

How do I compress these files, i.e. similar to how torrented movies can be only 700Mb in size?

HD takes up lots of space, especially full HD (you can reduce sizes by going for 720p instead of full fat 1080p). e.g. blu-rays take around 30gb per movie, so 4.7GB for 1 hour of HD video sounds pretty good.

MPEG2 is crap though for HD video, you're better off with MPEG4 (via Handbrake etc) as it's more efficient and produces better results for a given file size.

If you want small files but will keep the source files backed up somewhere to preserve quality, you could try reducing the quality of the compression until you find a sweet spot, as there's always a trade off between quality and file size, though lesser quality setting doesn't always mean perceivable loss.

e.g. I find 70% quality almost identical to full quality when compressing to MP4.

Always worth keeping the source file (before any compression) as you never know what you might want to do with it later and you can't get the quality back once it's gone.

[Support Monkey]

why not just buy more storage, thats got to be easier than messing about converting them, losing the quality into the bargain

[stek]

I've got this great Panasonic video camera, well I mean great for me as it's a point and shoot with full HD etc. Problem is that the HD movie is ridiculously large in file size, with 1 hour of video being over 8Gb on file. When I use the Panasonic provided software "HD Writer AE 2.0" to convert this to MPEG2 (for the less important home movies), the file is still stupidly big, 1 hour of video taking some 4.7Gb.

Is this normal?

How do I compress these files, i.e. similar to how torrented movies can be only 700Mb in size?

You need ro encode them, something like VisualHub or Final Cut.

[ChimpMaster]

I've got this great Panasonic video camera, well I mean great for me as it's a point and shoot with full HD etc. Problem is that the HD movie is ridiculously large in file size, with 1 hour of video being over 8Gb on file. When I use the Panasonic provided software "HD Writer AE 2.0" to convert this to MPEG2 (for the less important home movies), the file is still stupidly big, 1 hour of video taking some 4.7Gb.

Is this normal?

How do I compress these files, i.e. similar to how torrented movies can be only 700Mb in size?