Hi,Just a few questions as im new to the camcorder business.

How much gb of full HD recording would be in 2 hours footage?

How would one compress HD footage to get it onto a disc and would it affect the quality of the picture?

If you burn HD footage onto a DVD r disc,would you only be able to play it on blu ray or PS3`s?

Many thanks in advance

Depends on the video format, but if you've recorded in AVCHD/Lite, you can burn the files direct onto DVD and play them in a PS3 (or just put them on a memory stick, insert, play).

Unsure about 1080p video file size, but a 100meg AVCHD lite file (1280x720) taken on a Panasonic FT1 is around 55-60 seconds. Say thats 100meg per minute, and hour would be 6gig. So 2 hours=12gig, or thereabouts. Full 1920x1080 would be maybe 50% bigger?

Converting to a regular DVD format can be done for free with DVD Flick. Its fairly basic, but tends to give quite good picture. As for the drop in quality, its not too bad, but you're dropping the resolution to 720x576 - less than half the pixel count.

You can only burn HD footage to a DVD as a data file. You cannot make a video disk on DVD at anything other then SD resolution. For that you need a Blu-Ray recorder of some type.

And as has been shown above the file sizes involved may well exceed the capacity of DVD anyway.

Dunno about 2 hours but I have a 1min 21sec piece of 1080p hd avi from my camcorder and that's 79 mb...

With a 16GB card in mine it estimates 2h9m 1080p 17Mbps AVCHD

Thanks for the replies,when I upload the footage from my camcorder via the software that came with it(HD writer)I cant get the footage out of there and transfer it to my documents.There is an option to save the file as a mpeg2 which gets it out,but there no sound for some reason.
Anyway in the meantime,I need approx 2 hours of footage in HD on Monday a need it burned onto DVD disc.Its not going to fit on the disc so it needs compressed somehow,tried that dvd flick earlier but it wont load up the footage for some reason.
Sorry for talking jibberish,but this is mainly jargon to me and im trying to explain my limited knowledge the best I can.

What do you want the end result to be? is DVD quality enough or does it have to be HD? If you must have HD you might have to settle for 720p, it'll take up a lot less space. Is the DVD you want to burn it on single or dual layer?

Chris, as I understand it, you can put up to 20 mins of AVCHD footage onto a DVD and most blu rays or PS3 will playback as a High Def recording. My old Sony BDPS300 says it can playback AVCHD on a DVD disc. I haven't tried it so can't comment on how it works but from what you say, would you copy the AVCHD file from camcorder onto the DVD as a data file then most blu rays/ps3 would understand the data and play it?

I'm curious as might get a Panasonic TZ7 with AVCHDlite on it.

I burned a small amount of AVCHD footage onto a DVD R disc and it plays on my PS3 brilliantly.Jim as for your question about what discs,I have single layer discs here or I could get some double layer discs,I dont know if I could compress the footage onto a single layer disc without losing too much quality,can it be done and how can I compress?

I use Power Director to compress mine, I usually drop to 720p to save some space. Do you have a decent sized USB drive you could use instead? you would have to break it up into 4GB lumps but you could create a playlist so the parts play one after the other.

Edit: Have you tried playing it directly from the camera? I just plugged my Panasonic into the PS3 via USB, it recognised it and after a bit of hunting about the one video on the camera started playing.

DVD Video is SD format only. DVD Data can be anything you like. Including HD Video.

So yes you would need to burn it to DVD as a data disk not a video disk. It might be however that to play the file it needs to be in a certain folder on the disk. I have a vague feeling that in the manual for my BDP-S350 there is a folder tree diagram in there somewhere. If I can find it I may check.

But I would have thought that if the player needs the files in a certain folder arrangement then it ought to show that in the manual.

Will Power Director definitely burn AVCHD at 720p? Not all commercial AVCHD creation programs do it lower than 1080 lines (Sony Vegas for example IIRC), perhaps because 720p AVCHD is mainly or wholly a Panasonic thing.

Of course this isn't necessarily an issue if it's a Panasonic AVCHD lite camera which (IIRC) creates it at 720p but there might be video editing implications.

Its a Panasonic SX5

My Panasonic won't do 720p for some reason best known to themselves, its 1080p 17Mbps or 13Mbps. It also has 1440 x 1080 HE mode 6Mbps but I've not bothered with that. I've not made a 720p AVCHD on Power Director but the option is there if you customise the settings under H264 AVC.

The 720p I use is mostly for Youtube, I convert it to WMV 1280x720 6000Kbps audio 320Kbps. It keeps a decent enough level of quality but brings the fize size right down. I use it for both 1920x1080 (camera) and 1920x1200 video game footage (fraps).

If I want to keep the quality and resolution I use MPEG-2 BD but that still makes horribly large files, near 500mb for 2.5 minutes.

Thanks for that info - I'm thinking of buying Power Director.

Won't Power Director burn Blu-Ray in AVC/H.264 then? Seems to be part of the Blu-Ray specs, from what I can see, and would obviously reduce the file sizes.

According to their site you can burn Blu-Ray, don't have a writer so I've not tried it.

This is a screen shot of the disk creator bit...

http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/7403/20774759.jpg

I bought Power Director because at the time it was one of the few that handled AVCHD properly.

OK thanks, looks like it does burn BD in h.264 as well as MPEG-2.

I'll double check the other specs from the website, will probably buy it.

I can't fault it, it makes great use of multiple cores and gets a nice boost from a decent graphics card as well, really speeds things along.