Converting Quicktime to "Windows Friendly" format maintaining sma

[chrisf]

I have captured some of the kids concert and using iMovie have created some nice Quicktime clips. They are only short clips (5 mins) and managed to create Quicktime files that are approx 5MB and so are okay to email to the family overseas.

The problem is that a lot of my family are in Corporate Windows environments that do not have Quicktime installed and won't allow. As such, I want to convert to a more "windows fiendly" format whilst maintaining a file size that is emailable.

Using Quicktime pro, my 5MB file ends up as 30M when converted to AVI. Using ffmpegX to convert to MPEG again has a large file size (can't remember exactly). I would have thought that MPEG1 would be the best bet for email.

Any ideas ?

Thanks
Chris

[Cornucopia]

Do "Ctrl+I" ("'Apple'+I" on Mac) and have it show movie info...

If the video codec is something like Mpeg4 or h.264, you should be able to just demux and remux into an AVI container with ffmpegx and other apps (not that familiar myself here), or you could just transcode/resave in QTPRo to MP4, which should also be playable on many PC's as-is.

Size is all about bitrate. Bitrate is determined by codec efficiency and quality needs. For the best quality at a certain bitrate, get the most efficient codec/algorithm. These days, that would be h.264. MPEG1 is universally compatible, but old school in terms of efficiency.

You've got a 5min. clip (aka 300sec) that is 5MB (aka 40,960kb). Simple math says the bitrate is: 40960/300 = 136.5kbps, which is very low, but might be okay if you are doing 320x240@15fps with h.264. MPEG1 is about 4x-to-8x LESS efficient, so the 30MB for similar quality (819kbps) is about right.

Scott