Videoing with Cannon SX20 IS

Melissa Royal · Jun 9, 2012

Hi everyone,

I know my camera is not a DSLR, but this is the only forum I found suitable to write this type of post.
I have been asked to video tape a local event and am trying to figure out about how much video my SD cards can hold.
I estimate about 272 minutes on MPEG-1 for a 4GB SD card, however, my question is: how good of quality is MPEG-1?
It seems to me that it is one of the lower qualities that can be used and my knowledge of video formats is very slim.
If Mpeg-1 will not do, can anyone suggest a format that is better but still will hold a relatively long amount of video?
I have two 4GB cards. One is a Kingston and the other is a Memorex travel card.

Thank you so much,
Rachael

KmH · Jun 9, 2012

Kudos :thumbup: for making the effort to find the appropriate forum. You bet, this is the right place for your query, and it's a recent addition to TPF's forums.

I'll now leave you to the video experts, since I don't qualify as such.

rexbobcat · Jun 9, 2012

I think MPEG-2 is the standard DVD format.

MPEG-4 as a better compression to quality ratio meaning that you get smaller file sizes with little loss in quality, but they are a pain to edit.

And H.264 is a compression codec that the MPEG-4 container uses. It has excellent quality with small files but editing is not recommended once again.

In other words I would record in MPEG-2 and then export as MPEG-4 for the web and mobile and MPEG-2 for television and DVD

Melissa Royal · Jun 11, 2012

rexbobcat said:
I think MPEG-2 is the standard DVD format.

MPEG-4 as a better compression to quality ratio meaning that you get smaller file sizes with little loss in quality, but they are a pain to edit.

And H.264 is a compression codec that the MPEG-4 container uses. It has excellent quality with small files but editing is not recommended once again.

In other words I would record in MPEG-2 and then export as MPEG-4 for the web and mobile and MPEG-2 for television and DVD

Thank you for the information!

How many minutes of video do you think 4GB card could hold recording at MPEG-2?