DV Compression

So I got the ADVC 110 from Canopus and hooked my old minidv camcorder up to it and imported it through iMovie but it saves it as like 10 gbs of video. What should I use to convert it without losing quality and what format would that be?

Nobody?

10gb's? How much video? If you want to keep the video longterm without losing any quality I'd suggest some extra storage (maybe in the form of an external HDD).

But, you don't have to do that. If you have compressor (which comes with FCS (both versions)) or some other encoding program, you can encode in the h.264 encoding and that should give you pretty good quality versus size. You shouldn't lose much quality if you give it a really high bitrate.

Personally, I'd invest in some external storage if you don't want to lose any quality. It doesn't have to be the fastest if you're just storing it. And if you need to edit it, copy it over long enough to do your edits then delete when done and you will have your finished project along with all the original clips uncompressed.

EDIT: H.264 would make it a .mov file playable with any recent version of QT.

Compressing as hype stated will save you close to 60% space with little to no loss in quality.

http://www.macworld.com/article/61095/2007/11/imovielibrarycompressor.html

One solution to this dilemma is Nik Friedman’s iMovie '08 Library Compressor 1.2 ( ; free). This AppleScript-based utility uses the H.264 codec to compress the DV files in your iMovie Events folder; since iMovie '08 supports H.264 video, you can still use these smaller files in your projects.

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