Humongous File Sizes using Huffy codec?

[bluevine]

I'm a newbie experimenting in VirtualDub with joining some existing AVI clips (using File > Append AVI segment). I thought I would try out different codecs to see the results. The total length of my joined clip is 90 seconds and the 2 AVI files are about 150 Meg each. However when using the latest Huffy codec this results in a 1.1 Gig AVI file. Surely I must be doing something wrong. I've got the Huffy settings on "predict left" and "predict left/no decorr" which I think are the lowest quality settings. I know a lot of people on this forum use Huffy but a one hour movie would equate to 44 Gig using the above values. Is this normal with Huffy?
The other codecs I've tried result in far smaller file sizes
Thanks

[chrome307]

Hi there, I think the reason why the Huffyuv codec creates large file sizes is that captures all frames (LOSSLESS), where other codecs may drop frames eg Microsoft Mpeg4 V2 when you are capturing avi files.

Personally I use the Microsoft Mpeg4 V2 codec with Virtual Dub as the dropped frames aren't so bad and the end result is much smaller ie Huffyuv 9GB for 2 hours....Mpeg4 2GB.

I hope that answers your question

chrome ;0)

[Thorn]

Huffyuv (as chrome said) is a lossless codec. It only compresses about 2:1, but none of the picture information is thrown away. Mpeg4 compresses much more, but it looses some of the video quality -- it throws away some of the picture information (you actually shouldn't loose frames either way). You don't want to use Huffyuv as a final format (most computers can't play it back very well in realtime, and it's HUGE). It is best as an intermediate format, so that you don't loose quality before you encode to the final format.

For instance, I capture to Huffyuv, and then encode to divx or mpeg. This takes about 30-40GB per hour for the Huffyuv file. The resulting file is much smaller, but higher quality than if I had tried to capture directly to divx. Capturing directly to divx or any highly compressed medium is not recommended if you value picture quality.

You don't want to convert between lossy codecs multiple times - you loose some quality each time. Your final format will probably be VCD (mpeg1), SVCD(mpeg2) or divx (mpeg4). Remember that mpeg1 and 2 are not codecs so they're not avi files.