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Please can someone help me. I recently bought a camcorder a Sony HC35E. I can get the video onto my pc via the usb streaming ok but it saves them as massive avi files. Even a few minutes of footage can be anything from a few hundered meg to over a gig in file size. This is ridiculous. How can I reduce the file size without losing the quality. There must be a way. I have videoed my niece for about 20 minutes and the files are too big for a dvd disc lol. Have tried several programs but they either don't work properly or are too difficult to understand. Please can someone help I am at my wits end.

AVI is uncompressed video where as DVD is MPEG2 which is compressed.
Hence recordings from a DV camcorder are better than a DVD one. Also AVI can be readily edited.

With best DVD quality, which is 1 hour on a 4.7GB disc, the quality loss is unlikely to be noticeable.

There are numerous software packages to convert AVI to MPEG and then burn a DVD. However time consuming and PC power hungry.

Much easier to get a decent major brand (Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, JVC) DVD recorder with an internal hard drive and DV (firewire) input.