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Video Encoding - Very High File Size?

G

GeForceX

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Mar 19, 2003
Messages
4,172
I'm a newb at this. I have finally gotten a firewire capture card for my DV camera to connect to and it all works. I am currently using VirtualDub as my basic program to output .AVI's. I installed K-Lite Codec Pack Full that contains all the good codecs I could use. However, using a codec, I still get high file sizes for just a few seconds of video. First I used huffyuv to compress it (yet it did nothing). Then I tried xvid, it did nothing. Finally, my last test would be H.264, that reduced it to 18 MB. Just 10 seconds of video, it was a screaming 40 MB. Then compressed, it became 18 MB. That's completely wrong. What do I do here?

-J.
 
Doesn't help. I don't really want MPEG. I want .AVI. Any idea how to reduce file size with proper image quality?

-J.
 
Welcome to the world of Digital Video!

AVI files from a digital camcorder are huge... 13GB per hour, or 3.6MB a second. There's nothing you can do about that. The AVI format is an uncompressed format. While some codecs claim to make AVI files smaller... it's not very reliable. AVI is huge, period.

Basically, you'd capture your DV onto the hard drive as AVI files... then you'd compress them with another codec to create smaller file sizes. Formats like WMV, MOV, RM, MP4, and MPG are all types of video formats that are compressed to make videos smaller.

Outputting to AVI won't get you smaller files sizes...
 
Ahh, I see. How do video authors come out with videos online that are literally just 3 mb for a minute's worth of content? How about those gaming videos that are 20 minutes long yet comes under 400 MB? I know they aren't exactly real-life but when I tried to compress my own gaming .avi's, they turn out to be too large. There's obviously something I don't know about compressing. What are the best quality settings to encode with? Anything about those?

And how do I convert them to .WMV if needed? VirtualDub doesn't even save captured files to any other format except .AVI.

-J.
 
When you capture video from your digital camcorder to an AVI file, the video is 720x480 resolution. That's full DV resolution... which contributes to why it's so big.

VirtualDub is mainly a capture utility... not a video editing/output program. It's basically taking your MiniDV tape and saving it directly to your hard drive... in raw AVI files.

Sample workflow: MiniDV tape ---> AVI capture ---> editing, compression = web-friendly videoclip

You might try using Windows Movie Maker. It's free and comes with Windows XP. It will allow you to capture video from your camcorder, edit it and output it in many ways... including clips for the web. You can control resolution, compression, quality, files sizes, etc. It's a great program for making videoclips for the web.

There's nothing wrong with VirtualDub, it does exactly what it's supposed to do... capture video. Then, you have to DO something with that video. Or, use programs like Windows Movie Maker or Pinnacle Studio to capture, edit and output.
 
Thanks for the details. I will try it out and perhaps update you with an actual video. :p

-J.
 
Virtual Dub not only captures, it also has filtering options along with compression output. It's definitely not an editing tool though. With enough research and testing, here is the best file size I ever could get. I would like input on this. I should keep note that a very small part of the 2 minute and 18 second video is X-Rated (camera zoomed into a laptop's screen viewing pornographic material). And yes, we're all deaf here. :)

Here is my work desk:

mail


Download link for video:

http://s60.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=0Y1EHNARF8OF93UYR34Z86QMFQ

-J.
 
You probably didn't tell VirtualDub to compress the video stream. I don't have VirtualDub on my machine right now due to a recent reinstall (and I'll be reinstalling again in a week due to a new drive coming in) but you can find it under the Video menu, and select a codec like XViD and set a quality level. You can also compress the Audio stream to save space, so find an MP3 or OGG encoding codec you might have avaliable to pull that off.

It might be a bad idea to compress during capture though because you'll probably skip frames. Compressing takes time, and capturing from the camera is usually a real-time process...so it may be best to compress only after you've captured the huge file to your HDD.
 
Oh no. I definitely did not compress it on the fly. I captured all videos to the hard drive without any intervention. Then I compressed them to huffyuv. Finally, the last compression being XviD. And I don't use audio - it's disabled. Why use audio if we're all deaf? ;p

About frames skipping - did you download the video and see how it was? The video was compressed on low bitrate (768 kbps) as a test. Yet it looks fantastic for the quality and size.

Feedback appreciated. :)

-J.
 
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