How do I compress a movie (12.5gb) w/o losing much quality?

[aple]

I've got an hour long .avi that is 12.5gb. It's decent quality now, but it's impossible to work with. Every little thing I try to do with it freezes my computer.

Is there a good way for me to compress this down to somewhere around 4gb w/o losing a ton of quality?

[Ai Haibara]

Probably not, no. You're interested in cutting it to 1/3 of its current size - there's probably going to be a bit of quality loss.

Run the video through a utility like MediaInfo, in Tree View, and cut and paste the information here. Maybe there are some ways the video could be reduced, like converting the audio to a different (lossy) codec - but it's still not likely you're going to see a significant drop in size without a drop in quality.

You might also post your system specs. It's likely your video is HD, and your system just isn't powerful enough to play large (filesize and framesize, etc.) HD/h264 video without problems.

[guns1inger]

Sounds like DV AVI, which should be simple to works with (one of the easiest) on most systems. You haven't filled in your system specs in your profile, so we don't know what sort of computer you are working with. You also haven't told us what software you have tried to use.

[aple]

Sorry, should've updated the post. I ended up finding a tut on YouTube for using VirtualDub and the XVid codec to compress and it worked great. Got my size down to 773mb from 12.5gb without losing much quality at all. I was very pleased.

Now I've got it through Encore with a DVD menu/chapters and everything, but Encore CS4's "Build to Image" thing is taking for..... ever....

Looked up some complaints on it and apparently it takes around 6 FRIGGIN' hours.

Sucks so bad. Deadline tomorrow.

Will fill out system specs now. Also, downloaded MediaInfo, but by the time I got it all ready to go and find out more about the video itself, it was already compressed well.

[Nelson37]

You have not posted enough info on the original file in order to tell you how best to proceed.

You have, however, posted just barely enough to state very clearly that you are doing it WRONG and you will most likely not get the results you are expecting. Completely unnecessary re-compression.