I have a sony DCR-SX40 digital camcorder. it's nothing special at all and at like $280 it was the cheapest one i could find (but it still came with zeiss optics ).

all my videos are approx 20-30 min long and are roughly 1,500,000KB!!. I cut one down to like 4 minutes and it was still close to 350MB. they are "Movie file (mpeg)"

i can never get them to upload because it stops after 30min having only sent a few percent of the file. anybody know what i need to do to be able to upload them onto google video or youtube or what ever?? what am i doing wrong? thanks

 

You need to use some movie editing software (try vdub for some good freeware) to compress the video. If you are familiar with audio it's like having uncompressed WAV files vs mp3. If that still doesn't make sense it's like having regular files vs a zip file that can be used without compressing.

 

Seems like there are more video codecs than there are still camera formats! The gold standard of prosumer video editing is Adobe Premiere but the learning curve is steep and the price high if all you need to do is re-compress video at a different bit-rate/resolution/codec.

First thing to do is resize your video in the resolution of your intended display format. Youtube "standard" quality (there are more) is only 320 x 240 pixels... and mono audio. THEN look at file size and recompress (lowers quality) and/or recode (diff codec) as needed.

 

Given the OP's apparent experience from the content of his post - try Magic Video Converter. Free DL and simple