receommendation for video conversion

[soakland]

Hello -

I am trying to get our church sermon videos in as best as possible condition as possible before uploading. I am recording sermons in a Canon ZR-500 miniDV camcorder. I want to convert it into a format that is smaller than the original 6 GB file but still retain near-original quality so I may upload it. The Service we will be using, called Truthcasting, converts it to MP4 after upload, so I would rather not upload an MP4 ane have it further degraded. What are some recommendations ? By the way file size is not that big an issue since I have Verizon FIOS with extremely fast upload times. So I was thinking a 500 MB - 1 GB file size or so. Should I convert to a divX or xVid in an AVI container for close-to-original quality? Or use MP4? In experimenting I found I can get an excellent quality video using FLV with a result of 410 MB in size. Or will that furtehr degrade? I am using a Mac Mini with OS-X.

Any input appreciated.
Thanks,
Scott

[Baldrick]

Any compressing will degrade the quality but if you use good a encoder and high enough bitrate you shouldn't notice that much difference.

I would probably convert to mp4 with h264 video with constant quality encoding mode(the file size depends on the source video). Use a x264 encoder frontend like handbrake or avidemux.

And MP4 is not any codec, it is an container and can contain divx,xvid,h264,etc.

[lordsmurf]

Manually deinterlace and create a moderately high bitrate MPEG-2 at the same resolution.
I'd have to know the FULL DETAILS of the MP4 Truthcasting makes, before giving detailed advice on what to do.

PM me to continue the conversation, I don't always check back on posts.