Transferring video to computer?

[Craig]

OK, bought a digital camcorder Monday in anticipation of shooting some great runs this coming Saturday morning in Havasu :) When I go from the camera to the computer, the program I have, Windows Movie Maker, saves the data as a .wmv file. Do other programs initially save the data as different format, i.e. mpg, mov, avi? Which is the best compromise between quality and file size. I've read the new mpg4 is good if your camera shoots it, mine doesn't though. I guess you could convert it?
Craig

[Infomaniac]

WMV is a very good file type. Typically MPEG are larger files. Not sure about mpeg4
Go to Winfiles.com and see if there is a free converter.

[Red Eye]

When I've transferred video to the computer it saves some as mpeg and some as wmv. As far as quality, I can't tell a difference. Hope that helps.

[Sane Asylum]

Never used Micro$oft software to edit a video.
Adobe and Pinnacle Systems have video editing software that is pretty nice and easy to work with. They also allow you to save the file in several formats depending on what you want to do with it. I use Pinnacle Systems software. I save to MPEG and drop it down to about 340kbps for sharing on the internet. Thats about 15 Megs for a 5 minutes video. It will also save into AVI, WMV, MPEG2 etc...
Forensic
Craig...........How are ya ??? Forensic is right on the money.....Just bought new media center HP puter and put Pinnacle Systems studio on it.....Haven't done much with it but a serious computer geek at best buy demoed the software and made a badass movie for me in about a minute.....I've only done one movie so far but I believe it allows you to burn a DVD in whatever format you want.....All I know is that AVI (high quality) eats some harddrive space......I would buy the pinnacle and play with it......
PS.....The pinnacle is extremely easy to use but let's you do a lot of chit.....

[Raisin Wake]

Video editing software is a personal choice. I prefere Adobe Premiere. However, Vegas Video and Pinnacle Studio are also great products.
If you really want to splerge, try Pinnacle Edition. It's awesome, but, somewhat complicated.
If you want to keep things simple, Windows Movie Maker will get you started and do just fine.
By the way, the wmv format is pretty good.
Good luck