AVI to something smaller

[cwhaley]

I really don't do much with video, so I'm a newbie, but Mac-focussed.

I discovered that my new digital point-and-shoot camera will record video clips. I took one last night of a band I was out to see. The clip is only 1.5 minutes long, but the .avi file it produced is 150MB!!!

How do I scrunch it down? People send me high-quality video clips all the time that are both longer in duration and less than 10MB.

I doubt I'll want to do this very often, so a low-cost solution for compressing these AVIs is essential.

[tomlee59]

There are probably some settings you can alter on that camera. A bitrate of 100MB/minute is outrageous. Divx at just several mega*bits* per second already looks quite good (to my eyes, anyway). So, get out the ol' manual for that camera and see if there are user-selectable bitrates, and adjust accordingly.

Now, for the clip you already have, yes, you can transcode that into some other format. You didn't specify if playback on a standalone DVD player was important. If so, you can convert that into a DVD (or even an SVCD/VCD). You can also keep it as an avi, but one with lower bitrate. You won't notice much quality loss, because what you have is already vast overkill.

A tool like ffmpegX will handle the task just fine, and even has handy presets that reduces the amount of guesswork.

[cwhaley]

Thanks a bunch for answering so quickly on a holiday weekend.

I obviously need to read some more about all this... including my camera manual as you suggested.

I guess I naively assumed that file size might be a format issue. I was thinking TIFF vs JPG as an analogy.

At this point I'm not considering burning onto DVD... just occasionally email a clip to friends and family. That means a format that Quicktime or another standard player can play.

My experience is that trying to send an attachment bigger than 10MB results in a rejection at the recipients end most of the time.

Thanks again. I'll look into ffmpegX.

[tomlee59]

I do think it *is* a format issue; avi is what's called a "container", which can be used with a variety of compression types, including uncompressed video. So, your TIFF vs. JPEG analogy is a very good one. From the filesize, it's clear that your camera is streaming out either uncompressed or lightly compressed video. But without knowing a bit more (either from the camera's documentation, or from having something like VLC tell you what the clip's parameters are), it's hard to specify what to do next. But ffmpegX is a very flexible tool, so it can probably convert whatever it is (MJPEG?) into something more compact.

[mhar4]

Try MPEG Streamclip, too, as a converter. It's less flexible but easier to use than ffmpegX.