Video compression help please...

[psyko514]

I have an 6m30s long AVI file with sound at 320x240. It's about 100mb. I wanna remove the sound and get it down to a more managable size (<20mb)

How should I go about this? What compression should I use?

[nikudorei]

divx is pretty common, why not use divx5 or something?

[notjoe]

Originally posted by psyko514
I have an 6m30s long AVI file with sound at 320x240. It's about 100mb. I wanna remove the sound and get it down to a more managable size (<20mb)

How should I go about this? What compression should I use?

Sorenson 3

[mpegposter]

At good quality MPEG settings (800k - 320x240 resizable - 96k audio) you will get about 6 megs per minute of footage. That's 39 or so megs. lower your kbit and you can sneak it in under 20 in MPEG, but WMV is a good bet to get it any smaller and not lose a shitload of quality. AVI is just a big ole' format. Maybe I just don't know the tricks.

[jkvisfx]

QuickTime 6 using MPEG4. That gets you down to about half what MPEG1 does for the same image quality. MPEG1 just does not yield you the bang for your buck.

If you have QuickTime Pro, you can export from MoviePlayer to just about any other format that QuickTime directly supports. If you use a video editing app, (Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premeire), you can edit your clips, treat the audio and video separately as you wish, export it out to whatever format you want.

My normal work flow is this:

Two main apps, Final Cut Pro for editing, Discreet Media Cleaner 6 for compression and prep for streaming.

Import footage in to Final Cut Pro.

Edit, music SFX, etc. - all the normal editing tasks.

Export out from FCP a "Final Cut Pro movie" - this is really just a quicktime movie that has no recompressed any of the video it does not have to.

Open up movie file in Media Cleaner.

Set my appropriate settings for format and data rate and/or size, and let it compress away.

If you don't want to do any editing, simply comvert one to the other, simply bring your clips into Media Cleaner, choose your output and let it go.

I recomend media cleaner because it gives you output to MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG 4, AVI, Sorenson, RealMedia and WMV.

Since I am on Macintosh, I stay away from any format that is Windows only. There is no technical or aesthetic reason to use a Windows only format. QuickTime is the most universal and by far the most flexible. MPEG4 within QuickTime is about the best quality out there. RealMedia is also a good choice, WMV is OK as long as you use a codec that is cross-platform. Things like Dvix and MPEG1 are not so good.

Hope this helps some

--JK--

[SetTheWorldonFire]

wmv

[I'm Slim]

Originally posted by SetTheWorldonFire
wmv

Yeah, if you custom your video compression settings in premiere, to around 500kbps, u should get a size of around 20megs for a 6 min file, with pretty good quality. If u dont want any sound, just use premiere and take out the audio track and export.