Advice about compressing my finished video.

[cactuar tamer]

Hi... I've been making a music video. I think I'm going about things the wrong way, perhaps so I'd like some help if possible.


To get the clips for the video, I had Matroska files. I made clips from these with VdubMod and saved them uncompressed on my Harddrive. Some of the Matroska files had tracks that caused errors with VdubMod, so I de-and-re muxed them without the offending tracks, and made clips from them as well. The clips are currently taking up an ungodly amount of space on my computer, but other ways I tried saving them with VdubMod meant that they had problems in my vidoe editor, Vegas 6.0....

So my first question is whether there is a another way to go about the saving of the clips, one which might not force me to delete all of s-CRY-ed and some of Stargate to make room for them.

Next the video itself, is now more or less finished. I saved it the first time in Mpeg-2 format, as I did with my first video. But this time, it resulted in a significant loss of quality, and several dropped frames. Sooo... next time, I saved as an AVI file, and the quality and frame problems were solved... but, it's too damn huge for an AMV --- 802MB. (the Mpeg-2 was 109MB)... I suppose I could try another format, but the list just confuses me, and I don't want to just make random trial-and-error selections. I tried taking that AVI from Vegas and changing it with another codec in VDubMod, but it wouldn't run in VdubMod.

So, I'm pretty sure I have no Idea what I'm doing, and my second question is what format should I try compressing this into. 100MB or under would be my goal, but I don't want to loose too much quality.

Thanks for your help ^^

[redwudz]

Saving to uncompressed AVI will give you huge file sizes. I rarely use that. I would use HuffyUV, or for a smaller format, DV. It depends on the quality of your original source.