video compression help

[PsiFiIE]

you know, there's always those high resolution and high quality video but the file size is small... like those anime fan sub video for example...

i always wonder how you do that?...how can i keep the quality high but make the file size smaller?...cause i have a video here (720x480)that's about 35 minute long and the file size is like 1GB! and an anime i got with the same resolution(720x480) and about 25 minutes long is only 175MB.... how do you do something like that?

[yoda313]

Whats the destination for the file? Are you planning on hosting it on a website? If so you may want to try wmv. Believe it or not the free windows movie maker (xp only) does a very good job of compressing video to a designated size.

If its just for your computer burn it to a dvd or cd and store it that way so you won't take up space, don't compress it if you're the only watcher of it.

[PsiFiIE]

.avi, just like how those anime fansub people did there's... and i think wmv isn't that good...

[Stormin Norman]

What Yoda said, a few good fansubbers use wmm, just keep it around 10 meg or higher a minute for xvid or divx and you should be ok. FYI - the guides here are very helpful.

[lordsmurf]

VirtualDub, and learn what all the settings are for.

[PsiFiIE]

i've been using virtualdub cause that's what those fansubber use... but everytime i make the file size smaller, the quality isn't good... what codec do you use to compress? is there any tutorial here about this?

[junkmalle]

Forget bitrates. Use Xvid's Quantization mode. Pick the quality you want and encode.

Anime and cartoons tend to compress well because often large parts of the picture don't change from frame to frame, and there tends to be large areas of a single color. You'll also find that a noisy TV broadcast or VHS tape doesn't compress as well as a DVD rip.

[PsiFiIE]

what's the difference between single pass, two pass and so on?

[junkmalle]

There are two types of single pass:

Constant bitrate: No matter how complex the images, or how fast the action, the same number of bits is used for every frame. The resulting file size is easily calculated -- bitrate times running time.

Constant quality: Each frame gets however many bits is needed to get the quality you specify. You don't know how big the file will turn out.

2-pass (or more): During the first pass the encoder analyzes how many bits each frame will need, usually by performing a constant quality encode. During the second pass it uses the information from the first pass to decide how to allocate the bits to each frame. Complex high action frames get more bits, simple static frames get fewer. The final file size is the size you specify (indirectly via the average bitrate: average bitrate times running time).