Archiving old video camera footage

[Epical]

So right now I'm trying to convert all of our old tape-based video camera footage to files, so I can store them on both discs and an external drive for archiving purposes. The capturing of the video is fine and dandy, but the files themselves I have a couple questions about:

1) The capture method I'm using is a Dazzle DVC100, and it's proprietary recording software. The unit itself is fine, but are there any other software programs that are straight-forward yet effective at capturing video off a device?

2) Since it's branded as a DVD recorder, the output files are .vob (one's you'd find on a... DVD!). Is it safe to change the file extention to .avi and store them that way? I find that container is more popular and thus would be a better archiving method. Rather than just changing the file extention, should I download a program like SUPER and convert them to avi, codec and all?

2) The file sizes are a lot larger than I thought they were going to be. 3 minutes on "best" quality in Dazzle's software outputs a 210MB file. I captured an 18 minute section of footage, and it put out 2 files, the first being 14.5 minutes at 1.1GB, the second being 3.5 minutes at 242MB. Would again, getting SUPER and rencoding them into an .avi with a different codec compress them a bit? Storage isn't an issue, it's just these file sizes are a little unsettling.

I may have more questions later, but those are the ones burning a hole in my skull right now.

[Isiolia]

If your device is encoding DVD video, then yeah, it'll be big. You can't just rename VOB files to AVI because it wouldn't be accurate. It's an MPEG-2 file in a wrapper. You could encode them into AVIs and probably save some space, but you'd possibly lose some quality too, which wouldn't make sense for archival copies.

Tried looking in the www.videohelp.com forums?