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  1. Me and my friend recorded a homemade short film with an analog camera and then I captured it with my capturing card so that we could edit it digitally. We used pinnacle studio 8 to edit it. When it was captured it was captured in 320x480 but I want to burn it to a dvd. We edited the film as chapters from the begining. But I was a bit suprised that when resized to dvd format the avi file became humongosly large. I guess it has to do which compression you're using, I used the avi "compressor" within pinnacle studio. I thought I mayby could convert it later in TMPGEnc but will that compress the size of the file too whitout me loosing quality?

    I know that I'm doing something wrong but even so, the avi-files seem suspiciously large I mean 30 min of film shouldn't take up 40 gigs of hardrive space right?

    So anyway what I want know a good tip wich compression or whatever to use so I don't loose to much quality and still can fit it on a 4.7 dvd.
    I appriciate any help you can give me..
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  2. Member
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    Jun 2001
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    Surface-of-the-Sun (AZ)
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    With that file size it looks like you have 720x480 video with NO compression. I typically use the Huffyuv codec to compress the video without loosing any quality. This only compresses about 2x-2.5x, so you're still looking at 17-20GB for that half hour. There are ways to compress further, but they loose some quality (many people say it's too small to matter and use mjpeg or similar codecs). Look in the tools section for codecs.

    Another option may be to not resize the video to 720x480 until you're actually going to encode (unless you're filtering the video before resizing). That way it takes about half of the space to store the video until you're ready to encode. You could even use virtualdub to resize it and then frameserve to TMPGenc (but then you'd have to learn a new program). I think Virtualdub's resize function is better than TMPGenc's, but I don't really know for sure.
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  3. Thanks alot

    Huffyuv does only seem to be compatible with win 9.x and i am using XP.
    But the primary thing is not that it takes up alot of space I can live with that but how will it fit on a dvd when I encode it? does mpeg-2 take less space?

    The quality doesn't have to be perfect the most important thing is that it will fit on that dvd. But I was just worried since the quality is not so good to begin with, that the final apparence on the dvd will turn out bad if I let a bad encoder resize it. So I thougt that if I first would resize it to a large avi file (since it looked good) then it wouldn't be the same kind of loss in quality when converted to the dvd..
    I haven't tried divx encoder, is it woth convering first to divx and then to the dvd just to get it smaller or is there a more easier way?
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  4. Member
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    I use Huffyuv with win2k all the time. I don't know what about winxp would cause problems with it.

    DVDs are in mpeg2 format. This is a lossy compression format that makes the files much smaller than the uncompressed temporary files you are seeing. Typical mpeg2 bitrates for DVD are 6kbps to 8kbps (higher bitrates allow higher quality) so you can fit up to about 70 minutes at the highest bitrate onto a DVD-R if you use compressed audio. Using uncompressed audio (PCM) can cut the time down (or the bitrate you can use). Ecoding for DVD is a complicated field, so you should read up on encoding (newbie and convert links to left, and check the forum).

    Never convert to divx before converting into mpeg2. The more lossy formats (compressed formats that loose some video information) you convert between before your final encode, the more the video quality will degrade. Let me repeat, encoding to mpeg2 for DVD will do the compression for you. You do not compress beforehand.
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  5. Member Sartori's Avatar
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    HuffyUV works fine in XP for me , if you are trying to use it within Studio 8 , I don`t think you can get it to work . Studio 8 uses an MJpeg codec of its own to capture with , its settings are made by defining Good , Better or Best as to the quality setting .
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  6. Member ZippyP.'s Avatar
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    Every time that a file gets converted it loses quality. Keep the conversions to an absolute minimum.
    "Art is making something out of nothing and selling it." - Frank Zappa
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  7. The file size of your encode MPEG2 depends ONLY on the bitrate you choose and the source runtime. The size of the source file doesn't matter. Similarly resolution doesn't matter (although I would capture in a DVD legal resolution: 720x480, 352x480 or 352x240 OR capture at the highest bitrate and resolution you can, then resize to a DVD legal resolution. 320x480 -> 352x480 (or 352x240) only results in a lost of quaility.

    With that said. You can use a bitrate calculator to figure out the size of your encode based on runtime. A 30min video at max DVD bitrate works out to ~2.2GB file (max ~9.8Mbit/s which is normally over kill, esp at lower resolutions).
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