Need help with converting video please

[dod]

Okay, couple of weeks ago we were at the home international thingummys and I took a fair bit of video which people are now wanting to see.

At the moment the first bit is about 12 minutes long and sitting as an AVI file of about 3.5GB on this PC.

I've found a couple of trial convertors which convert it to MPEG and reduce it to about 1.1GB but also watermark it which is a bit of a nuisance.

Does anyone know of a free convertor available? And can it be compressed further?

 

[Marcel]

Definitely.

I take it this was with a DV camera. In which case it's likely to be in RAW avi (which is about 15 gig per hour).
You can convert it with a number of tools.

Microsofts offering, which is called "Windows Movie Maker", will convert it to WMV for you.

However, if you want it even smaller, you can convert it to divx.

Have a look at Windows Movie Maker, to convert it into WMV, and if you get stuck, or you need help, then feel free to grab me on MSN, and I'll help you get it sorted

marcelbooth@hotmail.com

 

[RobertP]

I've used AVI2DVD with some success. It is a front end for a bunch of freeware programs that do all the actual conversion and encoding.

You can choose output for DVD or SVCD and VCD [edit: all of which will play on an ordinary DVD player] so it can make things a lot small file size wise.

I've probably only used it 3 or 4 times and it takes an age to run but it is free

http://www.trustfm.net/divx/SoftwareAvi2Dvd.html

Oh and as it uses command line programs it likes nice simple paths and file names.

 

[dod]

Thanks guys, I've found windows media encoder as well and it's running just now. I'll see what it produces.

Am I right in thinking that realistically this is going to hav to be distributed on DVD's, not shared on web space?

 

[Marcel]

Not at all.

If it's only 12 minutes long it can be reasonably shrunk down to a downloadable size easily. It just depends on the format and the quality settings.

The thing is, with DV footage, it's uncompressed AVI, so you can shrink it down phenomenally.

 

[dod]

Wish it had a Jpeg setting

Edit: when you say "downloadable size" what sort of size are you thinking about? not so much worried about web space, it's more bandwidth I'm bothered about. Could easily be 100ish down loads.

 

[Marcel]

Well I think it depends on how much traffic your website provider allows.

If, for example, the file size is 10 meg. Then 100 downloads is 1 gig of your allowance. Some hosting packages dont offer much more than this per month. (Although some do )

Just food for thought really.
Failing that, if it's nothing private, then why not upload it to google video, or YouTube Bandwidth = free!

 

[dod]

http://www.todhost.co.uk/packages.php

I've got two bronze and one silver, although I'd rather not use the silver for a number of reasons.

Can a 3.5GB file realistically come down to 10 meg though, I know nothing about video

 

[Marcel]

I'm not too sure, I was using 10meg as a ballpark example really, to show how much bandwidth it can leech easily.

How about the YouTube / Google Video idea?

 

[dod]

The 12 minutes came down from about 3.5Gb to about 130Meg as .wav Not a bad reduction.
I'll have a look at youtube and see what restrictions there are if any.

Thanks for the help folks

 

[Marcel]

Not bad.

Also, is there audio in the video...and do you need it? Sometimes I've had videos where the audio is uncompressed and accounted for 90% of the file size.

 

[Hoodi]

I used to do a lot of this, but I've forgotten most of it :shrug:

As Marcel says, though, what about either scrapping or compressing the audio?

 

[TG.]

Okay, couple of weeks ago we were at the home international thingummys and I took a fair bit of video which people are now wanting to see.

At the moment the first bit is about 12 minutes long and sitting as an AVI file of about 3.5GB on this PC.

I've found a couple of trial convertors which convert it to MPEG and reduce it to about 1.1GB but also watermark it which is a bit of a nuisance.

Does anyone know of a free convertor available? And can it be compressed further?

i did this myself quite a while back now, i used ulead video software, i'm sure i still have it lying around somewhere, if you pm me with your address i will send you a copy.

 

[dod]

Thanks guys, sorted now, got someone else to host it

TT, it's ulead I've got here for the capture.