[Kdenlive-devel] Beginner: coverting avi to kdenlive format

[Sim]

Hi,

my avi files are coming from my digital camera (Canon S50) and I know they 
cannot be read by kdenlive directly.  With a lot of work I managed to convert 
some to DV to work with kino but these don't seem to work for kdenlive.  
Meanwhile the converted files were 5x larger than the originals!

Can someone help me with the specific comands to convert to a format kdenlive 
can del with?

Sim