Converting without degrading

[nationofsize]

Hi, I have a brand new DVX100 camera that I’ve been shooting some stuff with in 24p. I capture my footage and edit it together using Adobe Premiere and when I export the finished files as uncompressed AVI’s they look gorgeous. However, the files are quite huge. I want to post my stuff on YouTube, so I’ve been trying to compress it.

Unfortunately, whenever I do so the finished product looks significantly degraded. I know that obviously with compression there’s going to be some loss of quality, but I have also seen things on YouTube that look way better than what I come up with.

Recently, a friend told me mpeg-4 was the way to go and I’ve been messing around with some of (what I think are) the more popular avi-to-mpeg4 conversion programs (Allok, AimOne video converter, and RER video converter), but they all drop frames, to the point where I’m losing several seconds of video. I have tried different frame rates, different bit rates, different audio and sound qualities, different resolutions: EVERYTHING! And yet, the converted mpeg4’s are all dropping a few seconds in the same place (for example, there’s one place 1:28 into the movie, another 1:52 in, etc).

Any thoughts on how to get my big beautiful AVI’s to something more manageable yet still gorgeous? Or at least how to convert into MPEG4 without losing seconds from my movie?

Thanks so much!
-Dan

[Baldrick]

See https://forum.videohelp.com/topic333660.html , how to prepare video for youtube.

And if you want good looking mpeg4s use h264 video but avoid easy all-in-one tools. Use for example megui.