Yeah, really. I have some 720p movies that are about 4 minutes long and take up about 350MB or so, each.
i dont plan on recording 'a lot'. max like 1hour while on vacations, etc and i would be able to transfer it onto my pc. how much space would that take approx
An hour would take over 4GB, almost 5. Yes, really.
Think about it: a low-quality DVD can record 2 hours of
standard definition 480i video, and nothing else, and it'll take 4.7GB and look semi-passable.
But with the iPhone, this is 720p HD video you're recording. The iPhone is actually doing a
better job at compression and delivering higher-quality video.
This is why movies are currently being compressed and downsampled before being uploaded to YouTube.
And
this is why AT&T eliminating unlimited data plans for new users is good for them and bad for us, and their logic is false. Yeah, iPhone 3GS and previous users mostly used under 250MB of data monthly. Those stats mean nothing when you add 720p video and 5MP photos to the mix.
One thing you could do is, when you get home, use a tool like Handbrake to further compress the video to make it smaller. Your iPhone does a good job at compressing video, but it has to balance compression with battery life and CPU load. If you do it right on your home computer, you can get somewhat better results - maybe shave another 20-30% off the file size without too much of an impact on video quality, and even more if you're fine with the quality suffering or using a lower resolution. But until then it's gonna take up a lot of space on your iPhone.