Video Compression Blues

Cybercafe - Delhi, India

This is one for the video nerds...

The OC is shooting about 1 1-hour mini DV tape per week. Each tape contains about 13 gigs of data. I am trying (with little success) to come up with a data management strategy that achieves the following goals:

1. Provides a secure backup of every bit ever shot.
2. Provides access to a "decent" quality version of all footage while on the road.
3. Limits the amount of stuff we have to carry around.
4. Minimizes wear on the camera motors.
5. Is "fast" and "convenient".
6. Does not require me to buy expensive (> $50) software.

We have a folder of 100 DVD-Rs (4.7 G per disc) taking up most of the space in my bag. The idea is to use these to store a reduced-quality version of each tape and backup the data by posting the originals back to Fortress USA. I would like to maintain 1 tape / 1 disc parity. At an average rate of 1 tape per week, this should give us plenty of storage for 13 months with plenty to spare for other data sources (photos, completed video projects, blog entires, etc.).

So, the essential problem is:

How do I compress 13 G of video into 4.7 G of "decent" quality video "quickly" using only 2 G4 iBooks?

This question is proving more more difficult to answer than I had hoped.

Experiments show that my iBook does not have the processing power necessary to encode a 1 hour MPEG in an acceptable amount of time. Every attempt so far has taken at least 8 hours, with on-screen estimates of completion time usually hovering around the 24 hour mark. Lame. More simplistic efforts have had unexpectedly frustrating results. For example, using Final Cut Express to create a lower resolution (smaller) version of the raw video using an uncompressed codec results in a file that is the same size or larger than the original. Ugh. Utilities like gzip are out of the question because it takes almost as long to compress a large file as it does to encode an MPEG. Grrrr.

So, if there are any video encoding/compression experts out there, now is the time to pipe up. Please. The stack of tapes in my bag is starting to get out of control. Also, should something happen to said bag, we would lose all video to date.