General video editing help

Hey guys. Currently, 320x120 movie clips (.MOV, QuickTime) on my digital camera are hell big. Three minute clips are around 30 MBs! I'm sure there are ways for me to reduce the file size, and perhaps change it another format if that makes sense.

What programs do you guys use? Any decent, easy to use freeware? To give you guys context of how video-savvy I am, most of the earlier conversations about the Kakutou Shinseki movie conversion/ripping went way over my head.

However, any help whatsoever would be most appreciated!

 

The .mov format has a only a few codecs...sorensen, which is what you see most of the time (like on quicktime's movie trailer page) gives poor-to-ok compression. Cinepak is also pretty common and gives poor compression. Sorensen is probably what your digital video camera is creating.

If at all possible, can you get the raw footage out of your camera without having it automatically compress it to .mov format? Raw footage is typically in AVI format, and is huge (think 100 megs a minute)... but once you have a .avi of any type, you can use some very nice freeware programs to compress it to internet-friendly sizes (like you can make it divx or wmv format).

If you're stuck working in .mov, converting to any other format is a pain in the ass and gives bad results... lower quality, etc. If you absolutely HAVE to work in .mov then my recommendation is this -

Make a quicktime-readable .mp4 file, which is fairly new stuff. The pros - good compression. The cons - Not many people have the plugin needed to see MP4 movies, and a quicktime-encoded mp4 will only work on quicktime movie players, both on windows and mac. You can't make it playable on windows media player.

The other con is I have no idea how to do it. BUT! I know that spotlite has done it before with success and can probably step you through it.

 

Make sure you find out what format the camera outputs before you buy your next one.

Or, it could be the shit software they make you use. Find a copy of Premiere or Virtual Dub and ditch that MOV crap. It's a pain to change the file format.

 

Dude, I knew it was .mov but I didn't think it would be much of an issue. Lots of websites publish their media in .mov and I don't remember quality-size ever being an issue.

Clearly what I have is a compression problem. Even when I double the screen size of my camera's 320x160 clips, there is hardly a loss in detail so I know there's plenty of room for increased efficiency.

One of the reasons I bought my camera was that it was one of the few that can take movie clips for an unlimited amount of time...most other digital cameras would allow only 30 seconds or three minutes.

Creed, thanks for the advice and I'll look into it when I get back from Italy.

 

Here's something I contributed to:

http://www.arcadepimp.com/videocapture.txt

 

jeff,

Hey, I had a lot of trouble with this as well when I started the whole video thing: good codec for macs/QT.

Fortunately, there is an answer: MPEG4. What you'll need is a version of QT Pro, which allows you to export QT files (movs) into MPEG4 format, which has awesome quality AND small file size (usually just under 10 megs for a normal fight).

Once it's in MPEG4, it's ready to go, and people just have to DL QT to see it (which is free). Last time, that's where I stopped, if they're too lazy to DL QT, fuck 'em. But, if you want to be nice, you can re-encode the MPEG4s as mov's, even avi's; again just use the export feature.

If you're capping off a projection screen, or they're a little dark, what I do is this: do "Show Video Controls" while watching the clip in QT, and then up the Brightness until it's good, this'll wash it out, so next I pump up Color a touch, then I usually also bring Contrast down a little, which also washes it out, but will take the whole picture up in terms of brightness, if it's still a little dark. I don't fuck with Tint, there's no need to. That's how I did the footage from Evo, which came out really dark, and everyone said it looked good.

After I altered the Video settings, and re-saved, QT automatically saved it as a MOV again, not MPEG4, although file size remained low. Guess changing the settings re-codes the video in a way the QT player needs to decipher. I'm sure you could Export it again into MPEG4 if you wanted.

So, from my camera I go to iMovie, where I get the footage, which is raw and usually HUGE (like 1/2 a Gig for a fight!). From there, I "Export to Quicktime", which takes it down to usually about 100 megs for a fight, great quality. From there, I open it in QT, and Export to MPEG4 as I mentioned above. Hope this helps.

Fuck WMP! Macs Rule!

Spotlite