B-Roll: File formats and file size

You would want to know if you the video 720, 1080, or if it's so old that it's SD video. 8000 is ok for 720. If you have 1080, you should go with a higher bitrate, somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000. If it's SD, it's not actually broadcast quality by modern standards. If you have the space, it's best to default to a higher bitrate.

Oh and as always, the free software MPEG Streamclip is your friend. It's the only conversion program or process that has ever had me *not* throwing things and swearing for the neighbors to hear.

Not a professional or anything, just a weird obsessive person. I've played around with this a lot. 50,000 is bluray quality. I mean, it's not, but that is the point of no more returns. Anything compressed at all is going to get macroblocked a little, and that was the point at which everything basically looked like JPGs at quality 100 whenever i paused, and on every frame. Cable/satellite compression is going to fuck up everything horribly anyways. I mean, i get why you'd want a high quality source file, but i just don't see the purpose of anything higher than that. I never hunted around much with 720p, but i'd assume that would be somewhere around 25,000 to 30,000, seeing as how it's almost exactly 1mp and 1080p is pretty much 2mp. 8800-10k for SD widescreen should be spot on as well.

300gb, really? WTF? I don't think that can be right - how would you have recorded it, there's no media that stores 300gb for a (consumer grade) camera that I know of?

I think that has to be a typo, given that later the questioner states that total amount is about a terabyte. Perhaps it would help if the poster explains more about their anticipated future needs for this footage. It may inform the choice of compression algorithm (by clarifying how much loss is permissible.)

It's not a typo. One of my drives has a 290GB 30 minute .avi using the following codec: 10-bit 4:2:2 COmponent YcbCr V210.

H.264 in an MP4/M4V container is an excellent modern combo, playable on nearly all modern devices. Bitrates of around 2200-4400kbps should amount to about 1-2GB/hour of video are are very much viewable. Make it 8800kbps if you want more quality. Set your transcoder for maximum quality (and therefor minimum encoding speed), and let the transcode run by itself, no other resource-needy applications running at the same time or allowed to start themselves. Audio codec (MP3, AAC, or AC3-- I would stick with MP3 for universality) should be around 192-256kbps; you're looking at 1.5-2MB/minute of audio for those, which is really peanuts compared to the video filesizes we're talking about.

Thanks Sunburnt. So I'd want 8800kbps if I want to keep it broadcast quality?

8800 is somewhere on the order of DVD quality for SD (720x480i for NTSC) video-- I think DVDs are around 8000 for a typical 4.3GB DVD, though many DVDs have higher capacity. If you're okay with 4GB of disk space per hour of video, purely in terms of space and filesize, then compress one of your videos and eyeball the quality; I hate to tell people what the quality is, because the user's eyeball is the best standard. But I think you'll be very happy with the quality, unless your standards are much higher than mind.