Reducing Filesize of .avi

[jonesb]

Videos from my digital camera are too big.

Is there any reduction program to chop a big .avi down to either .avi or other format?

[minidv2dvd]

it would help to know what the final format you want is, or at least what it's going to be used for and what camera or what format it is in now.

but, yes there are lots of programs to re-encode it to smaller file sizes.

[tomlee59]

Videos from my digital camera are too big.

Is there any reduction program to chop a big .avi down to either .avi or other format?

As minidv2dvd says, there are lots of ways to do this. To narrow down the list to the most appropriate choices, you need to tell us more about what you are trying to accomplish, what format the source is in, and what your objectives are. Is quality preservation important? Do you need to be able to edit the result easily? Do you only need to view the end result on a computer, or will you eventually want to burn DVDs? Etc.

Understand that there's a general tradeoff between quality and size, and that each conversion further degrades quality. Infinite shrinkage is possible, but quality constrains what can be done practically, so you'll need to calibrate us on what your specific needs are.

[Supreme2k]

If you are capturing through firewire, it may be lossless, and thus HUGE. You have quite a number of format options (mpg2, avi, h264) which will give minimal quality loss.

[jonesb]

Here is more information about my problem. Camera is a Canon PowerShot SX100 with 8.0 megapixels.

It has four settings for movies, which are output in .avi

Superfine; Fine; Standard; and Compact.

The Standard mode produced a file of 1145 MB for 60 minutes. I plan to record a talk which will last about 45 minutes.

Using "Format Factory" I was able to reduce the file to 99MB. It would not reduce further. Using "DVDShrink" it came down to about 80MB in the VIDEO_TS format.

Quality, clarity and sound remain excellent on all reductions so far.

The "Compact" setting of the camera produces blurry files and has a ten minute limit, so it's of no use.

Repeating my initial question. Can the 80-99MB file be reduced any further - or is the the normal size of a one hour video? With what software? What size are the 10-minute YouTube clips? I can't imagine they are one sixth of 80MB (eg about 15MB) are they ??

This is where I want to go with the big .avi file - to YouTube standard and size. For possible later posting on a web site.

Hope this helps .......

[minidv2dvd]

for youtube, start with the original camera file. if you wanted to, you could upload that to youtube, they accept filesizes up to 2GB. to reduce it to a more manageable size, use a program like hanbrake to encode it to mp4 h264 with aac audio. use a bit rate around 1000kbps. don't encode it more than once.