Question : Sharing camcorder footage

Seeking advice / suggestions re locations, resources, tools, techniques, etc for sharing with a choir and church community and maybe even more broadly camcorder footage of several choir concerts.

This is a new area for me, as new as my recently acquired camcorder.

The camcorder is a JVC.  The video files it makes are .MOD's.  They open fine with Windows Media Player (but not Quicktime).  I recorded onto 8 GB HDSD cards and have transferred them to a PC HDD.  Early on in the concert series, I shot an entire performance as a single file. The performances were about an hour, and these files are about 4 GB each.  Later I began stoppng and restarting after each piece. These are about 300 MB each.

I thought first of making DVDs for the choir members, about 40 in number, but that's a lot of disks and a lot of time.  I don't have and don't want to go down the road of a bulk DVD duplicator.

I'm wondering if there web sites to which these could be appropriately uploaded as a means of sharing.  The total size is about 24 GB.  I've already experienced what uploading them could be like;  I tried backing them up to an online backup service just in case something happened to my PC on the flight home, (This footage was recorded in Prague, Vienna, and Salzburg) and it took 8 hours and hadn't finished by the next moning when I had to shutdown and pack up to leave.  So I'm hoping to improve on that time factor if there is a way to go this route.  Even put them on YouTube if that would be possible.

If compression would be factor that anyone mentions, please elaborate as to best tools and techiques.

Any suggestions most welcome.

Thanks, Ron Hicks

Answer : Sharing camcorder footage

You should convert those files into a compressed formats to lower the size. That files you have are the raw files and is not intended for sharing.

You can try mediacoder, a free opensource audio/video transcoder http://www.mediacoderhq.com/

it has ready profiles so you can just select the appropriate players your recepient will likely use and it will automatically set the recommended settings for you.

goodluck