A 5 minute piece takes up about a gb on my hard drive. I am capturing a lot, and it seems to be taking up a lot more space than it should. . . .

Is there any way to compress with virtually no loss in quality? Or, am I capturing wrong?

I'm using Adobe Premiere 6.5.

Your doing nothing wrong. DV already *IS* compressed (at a
5:1 ratio)! 18 minutes will yield 4 GB which is the same as your
5 minutes (rounded). If you want to maintain quality don't
compress it futher. Just get a bigger harddisk like we all do
(they aren't that expensive anymore).

I have a 150gb external for my pc. . .and, I'm getting a laptop when I go to college, and I don't want to dish out the money for a new external. :-/

I have enough space, now. I just didn't realize it. For some reason, I thought I would run low with 80gb left. It's one of those "I don't know how to think" things.

80 gb will hold around 360 minutes of footage, or 6 hours.
Ofcourse you will need space for intermediate files and final
rendering etc. But I'd say that is enough room to start with!

For sure, Rob.

FOR SURE, ROB!

Haha, thanks for the help.