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I have a question regarding video compression. I took some video of a few of my guitars and transferred it to my computer. If I transfer the full motion video as an .avi file, the file size is huge. When I try and compress it using an mpeg format (or several other microsoft versions), the file size is much better but the quality really suffers. Does anybody know how I can get quality close to dvd format at much smaller file sizes than .avi? Right now a short 5 minute clip is over 1 gig file size. What are the codecs or compression formats used to give best quality and smallest file size?

Thanks!

John

Hi John,

Whatever codec you use will have to either already be on the viewers computers, or they will need to download the codec. That said, the DivX codec is powerful, but not free for you ($20), though it will be free for your viewers to download.

Dennis

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Dennis Leahy
Duluth, MN, USA
7th Sense Multimedia

I don't have a ton of experience in this, but I found the .wmv codecs to render a decent quality video with a small size. I think the codec's free from Microsoft if your editor doesn't already have it.

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Jonathan Kendall, Siloam Springs AR

I use mainly Apple's Quicktime conversion. It renders a wonderful and
much lower file size than you mention, although a .avi, depending on the
resolution, is usually not a huge file.

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John Mayes
http://www.mayesluthier.com

You can go for XviD as well, which is DivX, only free. Check videohelp.com for all manner of tips, hints, tutorials, software, etc.

I really don't like Quicktime very much, because of the player-specificness (the QT player is the slowest one to load on my machine). Don't much like WMV, because, well, my slight anti-Microsoft bias.

All of these are basically mpeg4 implementations, and don't differ much 'under the cover'.