Compression, conversion, and splitting of MOV files

[weareone]

Greetings:

I'm trying to upload of video to Youtube. the probelm is that it's 171 MB, which surpasses the upload file size limit of 100 MB. Intuitively, it seems like if I could delete the last 41.5 % of the file (which would be the last 340s as its 819s long), that I might be able to upload it. Is there a way to just delete a section of a video file, much like with home recording software you can delete a section of a clip? I see videos cut off all the time on Youtube as if they were thus edited.

Shifting gears a bit, I copied the following information from Youtube's site. It spells out the file specifications that they recommend for optimal video quality.

MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format
640x480 resolution
MP3 audio
30 frames per second

My understanding is that my digital camera, Kodak EasyShare Z612, shoots videos at a frame rate of 30 per second. Although I can take videos in 640x480 resolution, I ordinarily like to shoot them at 320x240 in order to make a smaller file. Again, my cameras produces MOV files, though it says on Steve's Digicams that it takes "continuous MPEG-4 compressed video with stereo audio."

That said, my question is whether there would be any benefit to trying to convert my MOV file to the Youtube-recommended file specifications. If so, how would I go about doing this?

I have already converted the MOV file to AVI, by way of editing it with Windows Movie Maker. However, the file grew from 171 MB to 1.5 GBs, thus, even had I been able to use WMM to delete the last 42 % of it, it still would have been way too large to upload to Youtube.

Thank you for your consideration and for your suggestions.

[Baldrick]

You can convert to wmv using windows movie maker and upload it. Or convert the avi to divx/Xvid using AutoGK. Or convert the mov directly to avi xvid using mpeg streamclip. Use lower video bitrate/quality settings to reduce the file size.

[poisondeathray]

This thread is long, but has a lot of information pertaining to YouTube quality

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic346256.html

Yes, you can edit clips, cut & join segments. The choice of software depends on what file format/codecs you use.

As a general rule, if you wanted the best quality, you should take at max resolution (640x480 for you), then do whatever editing, conversions later. The highest quality source file will always give the best results. Every conversion to a lossy format will result in quality loss. If you started with a bad quality source, the next conversion will make it even worse. However, this may or not be applicable, depending on whether or not YouTube converts your video anyway (which is my understanding)

[weareone]

This thread is long, but has a lot of information pertaining to YouTube quality

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic346256.html

Yes, you can edit clips, cut & join segments. The choice of software depends on what file format/codecs you use.

As a general rule, if you wanted the best quality, you should take at max resolution (640x480 for you), then do whatever editing, conversions later. The highest quality source file will always give the best results. Every conversion to a lossy format will result in quality loss. If you started with a bad quality source, the next conversion will make it even worse. However, this may or not be applicable, depending on whether or not YouTube converts your video anyway (which is my understanding)

MOV is the file format I use. I don't know what codecs I use, if any. Basicially, I want to delete a section of a 171 MB MOV file. Do you know of any programs that do this?

[poisondeathray]

I'm pretty sure Kodak uses the same format as Apple .MOV (i.e AVC Level 2.1). If you want to cut segments without any quality loss, use Quicktime Pro (unfortunately not free). I think mpegstreamclip (free) can handle QT .mov files as well

Avidemux (free) can do edits on Apple movie trailers, (using video "copy" mode), but cannot place it back into a a .MOV container, only .MP4 or .MKV. You can also encode to XviD with this if you want.