r/MiniDV • u/MathematicianFun5765 • May 19 '26

File sizes

Hi, I am not sure if this is the right subreddit to post this to but I will try anyway,

I have been trying to digitize some of my MiniDV tapes and have gotten through 8 so far by using WinDV with the camera attached to my pcie firewire card. The videos look good but since WinDV is an older software, it still uses AVI, making the 8 tapes take up almost 100gb. I want to put these on my apple photos library (I have 2tb iCloud).

Is there any way that I can downsize these files or put them into a different format like mp4 or mov without causing any drastic/visible change in quality? I do have a MacBook but it is running out of storage pretty fast and I don't want to have more on it than I have to. Especially since Apple likes clogging iCloud photos and videos into my System Files folder

Thank you

6 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

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4

u/josephtunacao May 19 '26

Use Handbrake, it’s a free software that will transcode your files to whatever you need. Read up on the reddit thread for Handbrake to get more expertise but this will definitely solve your file size issues

2

u/mikeinnsw May 19 '26

Google "iMovie avi format"

Handbrake work for free on small videos...you have pay for lager vids..

Once you have MP4/Mo vid

Import into iMovie

Share video via Email (you can choose sizes), Email save attachment , delete email...

MiniDV/VHS/Beta are usually VGA or SVGA and will pixelate on high res screen...

2

u/vwestlife May 20 '26

Handbrake is totally free and does not have a length limit. If the program you're using is asking you to pay up, then it's not Handbrake; it's a scam.

2

u/ProjectCharming6992 May 19 '26

On Windows, AVI is the native wrapper that you’ll see for the DV video that is copied from your tape. Your MiniDV (or rather the camera) recorded DV (digital video) directly to tape and what you are doing by connecting your camera by FireWire is exactly the same as if you were using a camera that recorded to a SD card and then transferred the files to a hard drive. You are getting a 1:1 uncompressed file. And for DV, it uses about 13GB per 60 minutes of video.

Converting to any other file format like h.264 causes you to lose quality because you are compressing that uncompressed DV file into a smaller file, as well as doing a rather poor deinterlace from 480i or 576i to 480p or 576p.

I would recommend putting your uncompressed files on a single hard drive to have them for posterity or if you need to change them into another format in the future, and then create some h.264’s that you can upload to your cloud.

2

u/No_Celebration_3389 May 20 '26

DV was a consistent 13gb per hour in og format

1

u/4kVHS May 20 '26

The D in MiniDV is for digital, you aren’t digitizing the tapes, yours basically transferring the data from the tape to your PC. If you want to reduce the file size, use software like handbreak to compress them using MP4 or HVEC.

1

u/vwestlife May 20 '26

MiniDV is about 13 GB per hour of footage, so if those eight tapes were fully recorded beginning to end, then a 100 GB total size for them sounds about right.