Video Compression

[erucader]

Hey everyone...

My cousin and I are working on some digital videos, we have a DV camera and he also makes videos with 3DS Max. The finished movies are in .avi format, but it is way too large for any practical use. I'm just wondering what the best codecs are that will compress to the smallest size.

[Floppyman]

Hi,

I don't know, but DivX might be worth checking into. HTH

[Xayd]

Depends on what you want to do with them.

MPEG-2 is your best bet if you want compatibility with DVD players (I'd recommend TMPGENC, it's 30 day freetrial ware but only 50 dollars to register it).

DivX will give you more compression but with some quality loss from the original and it'll only play on a computer.

[erucader]

Xayd,
I can't remember for sure, but is MPEG-1 free or not? Is it just as compatible?

Also how much compression can I expect (as in percentage of original file)?

Thanks

[Force Flow]

Quick Time 6 Pro can compress up to MPEG-4. I believe registration is $30.

[RJ]

The best would be MPEG-2 for SVCD or even DVD.

RJ

[Xayd]

You can expect compression with mpeg-2 of about 90 to 95 percent, raw AVIs are HUGE in comparison.

MPEG-2 is nice since you can use a variable bitrate, which means you can compress further by only using high bitrates on high detail scenes and a lower bitrate on low detail scenes, therefore keeping more of the original quality.

Play with the trial version of TMPGENC if you wanna compress to mpeg, it's a really nice program. The only encoder for the PC that will equal/surpass it in speed and quality is CCE, which costs about 2 thousand dollars .

If you wanna encode to DivX or Xvid or some other freeware codec, that's free and easy, Virtualdub can do it.

[erucader]

thanks for the replys