Best compression for hours of footage? Long recordings...

[Iudex]

Hey guys, I just shoot a Kendo class and the Sensei wishes to see all of it in max quality (no dvd), 3 hours of 720p60p material... I started to compress the first hour of it with Premiere CS4, H264, VBR 2 pass 5 target and 15 max, 59.94 fps but it just took to long, the main problem I think it is I'm converting it directly from my SDHC card connected to an adapter...

Anyway, what works for you when you have to preserve quality for a very long footage? Suppose for example that you film your son's birthday and wish to keep every piece of it, not just the edited video... what do you usually do to keep it all without having it occupy half of your hard drive and not losing much quality?

Thanks in advance!

I.

[GuyB]

Depends on how you want to watch it. Only some DVD players support DIVX so if you want cross compatibility you can't use H264, you need to use MPG2. If you want longer record time on a single disc you are forced into using Dual Layer DVD-R which I try to avoid.

Other than that, if you convert your HD into something like DV or DVCPro 50 first, at least in your trial and error encoding to MPG2 your tests will be faster as the downconversion will not be repeated over and over, just the compression codec conversion.

Opps, just noticed you say no dvd, not 'so DVD'...

OK, so 3 hours of 35Mbps = about 48GB. That should fit on a Dual Layer Blu-Ray without any recompression shouldn't it?

[Iudex]

Hi Guy thanks for your answer, he doesn't have a BluRay reader and I don't have a BluRay burner for now so sadly it isn't an option.

I wanted to give it to him in DVD's for example, but the main problem is it takes forever to render with the settings I posted before... the quality is good, but I was looking for something faster for the next time.

Thanks!