Video Compression

[Tarrasque Wrangler]

Here's my problem. Those of you who go to my website know that my friends and I fancy ourselves filmmakers, and I've enjoyed putting up works we've done for people to watch on the Internet. My problem lies in the filesizes involved: my last film ran about 20+ megs for about two minutes of video. Now, I've dowloaded enough trailers off of Quicktime to know something's not right here. I mean, that new Harry Potter preview is a minute-and-a-half of beautiful hi-res, quarter-screen video and it's only 14.5 megs. We do our editing in Adobe Premiere, and I've played around with some of the compression codecs in the video settings for output, but none of them seem to make any difference.

I really want to upload more, but even with my new 100 MB site, I'm gonna run out of room sooner rather than later. Any help would be awesome.

PS I've got a great project I'm working on, but it's going to be looooong, like 8-10 minutes. No way I can do that with my current setup, unless I learn some new compression techniques.

 

[Psionicist]

DivX perhaps? It is really simple to compress a movie with DivX when you have to codec installed (if you don't, install ffdshow from sourceforge).

Then get VirtualDub. There are a couple of tutorials at doom9.org.

 

[heldenhammer]

You can do a lot better than 20MB for a 2 minute video, but you're right; it does depend on the compression codecs you use. I find Sorenson 3 makes really good looking Quicktime movies. If you're serious, you may want to invest in a compression program like Sorenson Squeeze or Discreet Cleaner. I'm not too familiar with Premiere but those programs will probably give you a better looking final product.

Good luck.

 

[Maraxle]

Get yourself a copy of TMPGEnc. It'll let you convert your video to a VCD-quality MPEG-1 file, which should be reasonably sized. It's free, too. Another option, if you are on Windows XP, is to download Microsoft Movie Maker 2. It's free, and it'll let you encode your videos in various sizes of Windows Media Player compatible files. You might find a size/quality compromise that you can deal with.

I hope this helps!

EDIT: I just checked, and an 8 minute 56 second video encoded at VCD quality came out to 89mb, so that might not be small enough for your liking. I'd explore the Movie Maker option.

 

[Tarrasque Wrangler]

Thanks for the suggestions all around. Tried out a couple, here's what I thought:

Sorenson's bloody spectacular. I wish the trial site had mentioned the big ugly watermark they slap on your video though. It got a 28 meg file down to under 6. I'd definitely be inclined to use the pro version, if not for the $450 price tag. Maybe I can get a bunch of people to go in with me.

I downloaded MM2 next. Nice little program, and as someone who's used PowerPoint before, it felt very familiar. I was able to do titles and credits, edit the raw footage, and get 300 megs (about 1.5 minutes of raw footage) down to a serviceable 10. It won't do Quicktime (which is my fave), but I can tradeoff format for the ease of use and good end quality I got with it.

Until my site turns a profit and I can shell out for Sorenson, MM2 might be the way to go.