Compressing your DV video allows you to create preview copies of your video footage/clips so all your footage is at your fingertips. Want to find that scene you know you shot? Search for it and then play it back without needing to grab your camcorder or do any rewinding.

Each 60 minute tape you catalog will take approximately 180MB* of space including clip images if you use the built-in medium quality setting.

That's a 98% decrease in space requirements!

The default compression settings use mp4 to create your preview clips. You can create your own custom settings to use any available QuickTime codec too.

How fast is the compression? Well it depends on your machine but here's some timings we've done on some of the machines we have. This is the time it took to compress 60 minutes of imported clips in medium quality.

PowerMac G5/Dual 2Ghz, 1.5GB:
18 minutes

Powerbook G4 667 512MB:
53 minutes

PowerMac G3/400 384MB:
110 minutes

If you do some compressing on your machine and send us the approximate timings we'll add them to this page. Remember to include the version of QuickTime you have.

Compressing is generally done after you've split your clips (if needed).

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