Video Encoding

[fatespawn]

Does anyone out there know much about video editing? I'm starting to get into it a wee bit and I'm being terribly frustrated by a lack of knowledge concerning various options. I know that you can get an hour of high-quality video to be about 300M, but whenever I save a movie (using either Windows MovieMaker or VideoPad Video Editor) I either end

Comments

[squidproquo]

I work a lot with video, but very little with editing. Since our high-res videos are our raw data, we save them uncompressed (leading to mounds of hard drives everywhere, yes). Occasionally I'll change the encoding/compression on a clip I want to use in a presentation, but since the clips are usually short that's more about getting it to play nicely with Powerpoint than concern with file size.

[fatespawn]

Oh the pleasure of raw data. My desktop is currently in the shop and I'm desperate to get it back because it has a terabyte of space on it and it's where I keep all my RAW images.

[zoatebix]

Wow. VideoPad looks kind of awesome.

So! Video encoding woes, eh? In order to help you, I've got to know some things:

What is your final product going to look like? Is it video for web, or for kicking around the office sneakernet/intranet, or for DVD? What format(s) is(are) the video your camera(s) spit out, and/or do your other sources use? What do your export/save as/encode options look like in WMM and VideoPad, since I'm not particularly familiar with either.

You may want to download Avidemux (for Linux, Windows, and Mac!), just to have another tool in your toolbox. It doesn't do non-linear editing very well, but it has a very robust set of encoding options. You may have to create a HUGE intermediate-step file in WMM or VideoPad in order to use those encoding features, though...

[fatespawn]

You're my hero (and not for the first time). Let's forget about WMM for a second because...well, it's free Windows software. Off the top of my head, I think its options are a billion different styles of wmv and 1 avi option.

VideoPad on the other hand has a million options. I'm going to focus on the ones it gives when saving back to the computer (as opposed to burning a video DVD or anything else).
Formats: wmv avi asf mpg
Resolution: 160x120 - 1920x1200
Framerate: 5-30
Lots of different bitrates.
And then a bunch of video and audio codec options depending on the format selected.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm aiming for yet. I guess one target is fairly high-quality for replay on my PC (but none of this Gig/10 minutes AVI business) and the other would be bearable quality for YouTube.

I should point out that my experience with VideoPad is that I downloaded it on Friday because Download.com recommended it as a good free video editor, but so far I'm fairly impressed.

[zoatebix]

Alright, that's a start. Container format doesn't matter too much when it comes to file size, it's the bunches of codec options that should have your attention.

So how about your sources - what do they look like? What codecs do they use? If VideoPad isn't forthcoming with that information, there is a good, free tool for that, too: GSpot Codec Information Appliance.

[fatespawn]

Oooo, that appliance is very handy. I'll definitely use that for pre-made stuff. Most of what I'm going to be using is coming straight off a digital tape camcorder, so it comes into the computer according to whatever program I'm feeding it into, which at the moment is Windows MovieMaker.

GSpot apparently doesn't do .wmv's, but the only information it can tell me about the .avi's that WMM makes is that their stream type is video/x-ms-asf

Everything else is n.a. Probably because WMM is hateful.

[zoatebix]

For an explanation of some stuff I alluded to and other useful information in lay terms, you could try this and this and maybe some other pages from the same guide.