Anyways, when I went to my friend's house to checkout hiw video projects, I realized that they were an exceptional large size...

Like, a 20 min AVI file was 4 GB!
it was a movie (like 768x500?), 16bit sound, 29.97fps.... but I couldn't figure out why it was so big.

I thought that DVD quality was about 9GB for 2 hours... and there is NO way that this is near dvd quality, as it was recorded through a home camera. Anything that i'm overlooking that's wasting a whole lot of space? I guess that 768x500 is pretty big... but 4GB? are avi's really that big?

thx guys

It was probably a DV AVI file. AVI files can use many different codecs and bitrates. RAW AVI files are massive. So yes AVI files can be that big.

ok cool

if I were to go ahead and encode it to something like divx4 or whatever, would my friend still be able to edit it using... i dunno what editing software he uses heh.

also, can mpegs (mp2, 4) be editted with software, or is it only avi's?

thx again

When editing it is best to stick with a lossless codec untill you are done.