Apple/iOS: record videos via iPod touch; reduce video size?

I have the latest gen iPod touch: which has an HD camera with mic. I want to record class lectures and such but the files are massive that it produces: 4+ gigs for 1 hour using the built in app. Is there a setting or another app that will allow extremely high quality audio and video without the cost of such a large file?

Currently I record, sync, encode then watch. My 1 tb HDD is filling up quickly.

Any suggestions?

"Extremely high quality audio and video" will take up a lot of space, so you'll have to compromise on quality if you want to save on file size.

I would suggest using HandBrake to re-encode your videos at a lower bitrate or smaller size.

I understand you want to record directly on iPod in any given lower quality to get smaller file sizes, but this is highly unlikely to happen. If you do encode the big file to a small file using something like HandBrake already, you might have realized it does take a long time to encode even on a desktop. So, I'm not sure if the iDevices have the processor power to do it on the fly, but maybe they do.

That being said, I'd say your best bet to save on file size and disk space is using a video service and just uploading your video on the cloud. You might go with Qik or maybe even Youtube, they'll encode to a very small file for you and you can even download them later - saving you the job to encode and you don't even need to fill up your disks if you don't want to - but if you do the files will already be as small as possible.

There is an App for that called (Video Camera+) and will allow you to record video at a lower resolutions thus recording at a smaller file size. Last I checked it was 99 cents.

Video Camera+ https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/video-camera/id441433868

It is very much like the built-in iphone camera app but it will ad the option to reduce the 1080p to a range of lower resolutions.