Ticia reminded me that you folks usually know the answer to every question so here goes:

We bought a DV recorder a few months ago and I now have a collection of four 1-hour digital video cassettes and no place to dump the contents but my computer's hard drive. I remember seeing a regular CD belonging to a friend of mine from college that had about 40 minutes of good quality clips from Saturday Night Live on it. I would love to compress my video files in this same way so that I could get 30 or 45 minutes on a CD. I've got the burner and sort of know how to use it.

I can get the video on to the computer in an AVI video format. It gives the attributes as 24 bit, 720 x 480. Hope that makes sense.

My most recent failure was a compression test of about 30 seconds of video. I have the Ulead VideoStudio software, which allows me to convert my AVI files to MPEG 1, about 320 x 240. I did this with the previously mentioned 30 seconds of AVI stuff and got some really poor-quality video at a good file size. It took up about three and a half megs. I like that seconds of video / size ratio, but I hate the quality.

Next I determined that 10 minutes was about the minimum duration of video I'd be willing to live with on a CD and thought I'd see how much size 10 minutes of AVI good-quality video would take. The answer is two Gigs! Way too big for a CD.

So my question is how does Saturday Night Live get 40 minutes of great quality video onto a 640 Meg CD? Then the next question is how can I do it for under fifty bucks?

Thanks for any help you can give!!

Don Thornton