DV camcorder to compressed file Version 0 1

Since a long time I’ve been trying to find a good way to get my home videos from my nearly 4 year old Sony DCR-PC105E PAL Camcorder onto my PC and turn them into reasonable sized files. I had been wondering a long time whether and how to deinterlace them, whether I should apply an anti shake filer, which compression format to use, and which settings of the compression format were best.

I still don’t know what I want, but I do know that the 31 hours of video currently take about 360GB on my disk, and that is excluding a backup. I also know that if my house burns down, I don’t have a copy of my video’s. So I decided to go get compressed files of some form and I’ll describe the process I currently use here, if not useful for you, at least for my reference later…

First, I use WinDV to get the files on my PC. One hour takes about 12GB in that original DV format, and they are interlaced. I configure so that it creates a separate avi-file for every shot. It also encodes the recorded date and time in the filename. I wrote my own small program that will parse this recorded date and time, and sets the last modified date of the file to that date and time. This ensures that when Picasa will properly order these videos.

To make a backup of these 360GB, I decided I was happy to use an XVid compressed format. So I used VirtualDub to do the deinterlacing, and to do the compression for video with the XVid codec (1 pass with quality setting of 90) and for audio with the Lame MP3 codec. To handle the large number of video files, I used VirtualDub Batch Assistent to generate a VirtualDub script file.

I probably should use the 2 pass XVid codec, apply some deshaker filter, make backups to Amazon S3, etc. That’s why the current process is version 0.1. It’s absolutely not the perfect process, but it does free up about 330GB, so I’ll its a good starter…