[thelist] Video sizing - anyone have any tips on shrinking/compressing video?

Gersten, John JGERSTEN at lchb.com
Thu Oct 15 10:37:57 CDT 2009


We're beginning to produce video for the web, and are running into problems vis a vis file size. Long story short, the cameras we are using (mini DV and a flip cam that dumps into mp4 format) generate enormous source files -- one 2.5 minute video resulted in a 3 *gigabyte* .avi file once it had been titled and rendered.

We have access to Adobe Premiere CS3 and Vegas Movie Studio Platinum. The latter is easier to use but provides very few ways (that I can find at least) to reduce file size. So right now we end up generating in Movie Studio and then doing a final render/shrink in Premiere. It's clunky and the videos look crappy, but even so, we can't seem to get the files below 60 Mb (which is still about 10x larger than we'd like).

We are not wedded to .avi format, if that helps.

Obviously, I'm doing something wrong (perhaps many things). If anyone could suggest alternative ways to arrive at smaller video sizes suitable for web viewing, that would be hugely helpful. And when I say "web viewing," I don't mean we want clips that look great and perfect at full-screen resolution; we just want easy little clips that default to, say, 320x480 or even smaller, so we can provide short snippets of advice in near-postage stamp size for visitors, a la web 1999 or thereabouts <grin>.

As always, thanks in advance.

John


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