[SentientCitrus]

For the sake of documentation:
I've been recording match videos for the regionals 1126 has attended (Finger Lakes and Buckeye). My setup was a Sony Handycam with DV (Firewire) out, hooked up to my HP DV9000 running XP, and recording straight to an external hard drive (500GB).

I used WinDV to capture the raw DV out of the camera, and pieced together the matches (Matchnn)+scores (Matchnn_score) together with VirtualDub set to "Direct Stream Copy" (Matchnn_final). The total raw DV footage (qual+elim rounds), was a bit over 50 gigs (doubled, actually, because I was joining the match and score segments together as a separate file on-the-spot).

I encoded the match videos with Avidemux using x264 (two-pass, target bitrate 600kb/sec, interlaced (because the source is), TRO changed from 0 to 1, max consecutive B-frames chagned from 2 to 4)+faac (56KHz), using AVI as a container. The resulting files were usually between 13 and 14MB.

(As a side note on using avidemux (2.4.1 - r3791) under Windows, it was a bit unstable, I set up a batch job to take care of the conversion, and it would choke after 5-15 files. It does at least pick up from where it left off relatively well on the next start - I just had to clear the job list of the files that it'd worked through since the last crash and have it run through the remainder.)