SpudFiles

My camera takes videos in AVI format.

A 3 minute video is huge and it takes forever to upload.

If I use Microsoft Movie Maker to convert the AVI to WMV it also takes a very long time.

Uploading a WMV file to YouTube is not too bad.

Is there a faster way to compress the AVI file?

I am aware that several cameras are YouTube ready but I already have 2 cameras and I would rather not buy another.

What do you use?

There are dedicated programs that compress video files into much smaller files without any / little loss of quality.

Try this program, it's pretty good and for free...

http://www.erightsoft.com/S6Kg1.html

edit:
You should also have a look on this site.
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/b ... wer=132460

I am aware that several cameras are YouTube ready but I already have 2 cameras and I would rather not buy another.

Don't you have a Casio Exilim FS10 or something? My FC100 lets me upload straight to YouTube, though I assume you would have already checked if your camera could do the same.

Or, use a more powerful editing software such as vegas *cough*download a trial and crack it *cough* you can choose exactly what format, compression, resolution etc. you want it saved at, not to mention it's a much better piece of editing software than WMM.

If you simply want to compress, and not do much in the way of editing, and don't want to use an, *ahem* 'budget' copy of Vegas... You can always use VirtualDub, and install a compression codec to make your AVIs smaller. I just used XVID to compress a 1+ GB AVI down to 170mb or so without any obvious quality loss. It's free and open source as well, which is nice.

Insomniac wrote:If you simply want to compress, and not do much in the way of editing, and don't want to use an, *ahem* 'budget' copy of Vegas... You can always use VirtualDub, and install a compression codec to make your AVIs smaller. I just used XVID to compress a 1+ GB AVI down to 170mb or so without any obvious quality loss. It's free and open source as well, which is nice.

Thanks,

You seem very experienced.

Vega will compress AVI

Virtualdub (I downloaded) and a compression codec will also compress AVI, what codec?

XVID will also compress the raw AVI file.


Am I correct?

Which is the fastest method?

XVID is a compression codec, you can take a large AVI and compress it into a smaller one. However, you need some software to actually USE the codec... That's what VirtualDub does. When you open virtualdub and click the 'video' drop down menu, you can select what compression codec to use... there will be a few that come with it/you already have on your computer, and if you install XVID it will also be listed. Select it and then you can configure compression ratios and whatnot. Then you tell VirtualDub to 'Save AVI' and it will compress it according to whatever settings you have selected.

It takes a bit of time to compress the AVI, but it's far from slow... It all depends on your computer really.

Insomniac wrote:XVID is a compression codec, you can take a large AVI and compress it into a smaller one. However, you need some software to actually USE the codec... That's what VirtualDub does. When you open virtualdub and click the 'video' drop down menu, you can select what compression codec to use... there will be a few that come with it/you already have on your computer, and if you install XVID it will also be listed. Select it and then you can configure compression ratios and whatnot. Then you tell VirtualDub to 'Save AVI' and it will compress it according to whatever settings you have selected.

It takes a bit of time to compress the AVI, but it's far from slow... It all depends on your computer really.

Gotcha, and it is rendering as I type.

Shucks! Too long!

For a 1:50 video, Virtualdub needs 5:30 to render and 23 minutes to save.

That is ridiculous.

Any other program faster?

A YouTube ready camera is not a bad investment in comparison.

Thanks

It's not so much an issue with the software, but with the hardware... Compression of any sort naturally requires a lot of calculations to be made... Some programs are more efficient and can do a quicker job, but if your processor isn't up to it, there is a limit as to how quickly you can compress a video.

A modern quad core CPU will make short work of most forms of rendering and video compression... I'm using a Q6600 @ stock speeds (not a very recent cpu, far behind the current breed), and it woudn't have taken it longer than about 5-10 minutes to compress and save a 6 minute AVI. (Of course, this can't be direclty compared with your result because my original file would most likely have been of a different resolution and format).

What exactly do you mean by '5:30 to render and 23 minutes to save'? When I compress things using XVID in VirtualDub, I'm pretty sure it does that whole thing in one step... IE I press 'Save AVI', I only ever see one progress bar... it's not split into two seperate jobs. I'll have to double check later though, but I'm pretty sure that's how it is...

You are correct, one step it is.

I am at the beginning of the learning curve and I have an Intel 1400 Pentium M laptop molasses processor in my Dell Inspiron 8600.

I wonder what it would look like if you further compressed the Virtualdub's AVI to WMV using Windows Movie Maker?

Thanks again.

boyntonstu wrote:I wonder what it would look like if you further compressed the Virtualdub's AVI to WMV using Windows Movie Maker

Worse. Only EVER encode more than once if you absolutely have to - multiple compressions will not improve file size, but it will worsen quality.

Very true Rag... If you have to compress something twice (IE edit in one program, and then make the filesize smaller in another), you should chose the absolute highest quality setting when you save the first file (so there is very little in the way of losses) and then compress the file with the second program.

If you want a smaller filesize, just set XVID (or whatever codec you use) to do a more agressive job of the compression...

I have been using avidemux to do my video editing and compression. Despite minor bugs running on Windows it has worked very well.

For uploading to Youtube, I usually convert to .mp4 file format (XVID MP4 for video codec and MP3 for audio). Don't crop, resize, or anything like that. Only thing I would suggest is to resize to 720x480 if your video is larger (or you can resize even smaller if quality is less of a concern).