I recentlmy bought a new digital camera with all the bells and whistles that I could wish for. The only problrm I seem to have is that the video format is JPEG (JPEG Movie) which results in a .MOV file (quicktime).
I can record video at 640*320 at 30 fps and the quality, for a camera, is amazing.
The thing is though at this setting, the movie file is huge, about 1Mb for 1sec worth of filming. So I end up with 60Mb files for 1 minutes worth of filming. My plans of putting some clips on the 'net aren’t all that bright anymore.
Firstly is it normal that the files are this big and is there a way of converting JPEG to something lese (MPEG-4/divx) without messing up the quality of the shoot (I’ve already been to doom9.org but no luck yet).
Yes, its normal for the file to be that large.
I think the best way to go about it is to convert the .MOV to compressed .MPEG1 (Or DiVx .AVI, or what have you) in post-processing, rather than while filming. Quicktime should offer this option (File > Export), but if it doesn’t, you can use something like ffmpeg.
I’ve owned three digital cams. All three produced huge movie files for only seconds of filming. My latest will only shoot a minute of 640x480 at 30fps despite a massive 4GB of space on the CF. (I suppose it can only store so much in ‘ram’)
I guess it simply doesn’t compress the movies at all. Maybe not enough room to do so.
i would suspect that it doesn’t compress the video format on the fly, because cameras do not have the processing power to do so. Compressing pictures, let alone video, takes a full-fledged PC some time to process.
High quality video ALWAYS takes up HUGE amounts of space, so IMHO, videos are best done on a video camera (digital preferably) and then transfered over to PC with the garbage edited out. Unless you are rich, digital video cameras are not worth trying to use as a digital photo camera and i’ve yet to see a digital photo camera that was really worth the price to do primarily video.
JPEG is not a moving picture format - only still snaps. I second (third?) the suggestion that if you want to shoot video, get a digital video camera. You won’t regret it. Furthermore, if you are serious about your stills, get a bigger memory card and shoot them in RAW or TIFF instead of JPEG. RAW=no and TIFF=less data loss if you want to do any hardcore editing.
Unfortunatly I’m not a serious video-shooter. I spent 400euro on the camera and it takes excellent photos and it’s ability to take video is secondary to my needs but still comes in very useful when I need it. I’d feel akward going to a party or something with my camera and a digital video camera 
I’ll try converting it to something using Quicktime (the Pro version was delivered with the camera).
Thx for the help !