Reducing giant AVI files?

[AdverseSolutions]

Hi folks I've just uploaded DV files to my computer (thanks for everyone who gave me help on the topic), but how the hell do I reduce these files to simple 60 megs or whatever? Right now my files are 12 gigs and shit...any suggestions?

[Sazae]

You can try using Win Avi and convert all the files to lower quality Avi's. If the files are already huge, by taking down quality aspects of it you shouldn't really notice anything.

[NoAffinity]

Your files currently consist of uncompressed video and audio. You can use freeware tools such as VLC or VirtualDub, or retail software such as ImTOO 3GP Video Converter or Main Concept H.264 Encoder, to transcode (a.k.a. compress or convert) your video and audio. The trade-off between freeware and retail choices is freeware requires the user to be savvy in what they're doing, whereas retail products are generally more user friendly.

I wrote up a pretty extensive VLC how-to in another thread, so if you want to learn VLC (which is an awesome and very robust program), I would suggest searching for that. Just to give you an idea of what you can expect as a result from a well compressed video, with no noticeable lack of quality, I recently de-compressed some captured gameplay (720x480i, 30fps), which produced a 30GB file. I recompressed with ImTOO, using more efficient compression codecs for video and audio (H.264 and MP3, respectively). The result was a 600MB file, with little to no noticeable quality loss.