08 November 2005, 03:20 UTC#1
I figure this should be a fairly easy question for most of the experienced editors here on the forums, but what method of video compression is best? My capture card captures video as uncompressed avi (massive file size for short clips, not to mention long ones...), and I have around 6 - 7 hours of footage as uncompressed AVI on my 111 Gb harddrive, which is needless say, taking up almost my entire drive (about 90 Gb). I usually use MPEG2 compression for clips I'm finished editing, so I can burn them to a DVD later. I need a format that won't have such insane file sizes, but still retains most of the original captured quality to store the raw footage in before I can get a chance to edit it. I know there are many different formats out there, and I was wondering what you guys thought would be the best for my delima.
Regards
Chris
08 November 2005, 07:47 UTC#2
QUOTE(RandomActsofStupidity @ Nov 8 2005, 03:20 AM)
I figure this should be a fairly easy question for most of the experienced editors here on the forums, but what method of video compression is best? My capture card captures video as uncompressed avi (massive file size for short clips, not to mention long ones...), and I have around 6 - 7 hours of footage as uncompressed AVI on my 111 Gb harddrive, which is needless say, taking up almost my entire drive (about 90 Gb). I usually use MPEG2 compression for clips I'm finished editing, so I can burn them to a DVD later. I need a format that won't have such insane file sizes, but still retains most of the original captured quality to store the raw footage in before I can get a chance to edit it. I know there are many different formats out there, and I was wondering what you guys thought would be the best for my delima.
Regards
Chris
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Good question. I'm thinking Mpeg-2 might be the best seeing as that's what most people use for DVD quality footage, yet at a smaller file size. Fuck rendering 6-7 hours worth of footage though :|
Or maybe Divx?
08 November 2005, 08:40 UTC#3
I would say invest in a bigger harddrive they are cheap as dirt these days. Uncomressed Avi is the way to go
08 November 2005, 08:48 UTC#4
Download Virtualdub.
Download and crack the latest Divx, encode at it's slowest (slower it goes - the smaller the filesize), at a good bitrate that suits you and you'll be fine.
In VD you can cut bits out without affecting the original video, you select start and end points in the video of what bit you want to encode, thus leaving you with more HD space from cutting out the lil bits of crap you don't need.
09 November 2005, 01:59 UTC#5
That virtualdub sounds about like what I'm looking for, I may end up getting a large harddrive in the end though (maybe one of those IOMEGA External Firewire ones). Thanks for the help!
