shrink movies

[ultra99]

does anybody know a program that can shrink movies 1-5min long to ~10mb? i use a sony camera and the movies are in .mpg format.

Edited December 15, 2005 by ultra99

[Jeremy]

Since so many average joe's ask this question and the answers to these questions are so bloody detailed, I'll simply give you this link.

[eidenk]

Though your question is way too generic, I'd suggest RV10 as output format and Easy Real Media Producer as a conversion utility. Doom9 forums is also a good place for that type of question.

[Jeremy]

VirtualDub will do him fine.

[eidenk]

VirtualDub will do him fine.

You should also recommend a codec.

Edited December 16, 2005 by eidenk

[Zxian]

You should also recommend a codec.

XviD.

Jeremy's the real expert on this stuff... he goes all out when he makes his home movies, so if you want the real deal, ask him.

Edited December 16, 2005 by Zxian

[Jeremy]

Well, I have to correct you on that, Zxian...

I'm not an expert. I just spent a lot more time with video encoding than some other people. A year ago when the FireWire port on my DVC wasn't damaged, I was uploading stuff all the time and trying my best to get the best possible results with the video quality. Going "all out" as you put it, in my opinion, would be using AviSynth and scripting with filters and frameservers to get the very best possible quality in my videos.

I haven't encoded much of anything over the course of a year. I still think XviD is better than DivX, and not because it is free! The fact that it is free does not have anything to do with it being a good codec. A good codec is defined by its ability to encode and give you sharp, vibrant, crisp image quality at reasonable fileszies. In my opinion, the best quality:filesize ratio is 10 MBs/Minute. When I did compare XviD and DivX to one another, XviD gave me sharoper quality at lower filesizes than DivX. However, DivX handled low-light scenes of the video better. XviD got "blocky" in low-light scenes. But, it's been a year, so I don't know how either codecs performs nowadays. The best way to find out is ultimately to try it yourself!

Cheers,

Jeremy