Making .m2t clips more manageable

[matthayward]

Great forum, guys - glad I stumbled upon it.

Recently got a Sony HDR-HC5 camcorder for my wife, which works amazingly. Only problem is that the imported files (through the Sony supplied DV Import) are huge, so we can't do anything fun with them. For instance, we have this 5 minute home video in .m2t format that's 870mb. Granted, the quality is unbelievable, but it's only 5 minutes!!

We really want to forward some of these smaller clips to family via email, but I've been at this for hours with no success. I've been trying different methods with Vegas 8.0 & VirtualDub 1.7.7 based on various threads found on the forum - but even after editing the file down to ~1 minute and converting to .wmv, can't seem to get the file size to below 20mb.

Please, just tell me what I need to do to get these shorter .m2t clips down to manageable size?? Thanks in advance.

[poisondeathray]

You would have to resize the clip from 1080p to something much smaller, and use a lower bitrate in conjunction with a compression codec. If you want 870MB => 20MB this suggests to me tiny dimensions, crappy quality.

If you were able to open your stream successfully in virtualdub, compress with something (avc, xvid, divx) at a low bitrate, and use a resize filter.

Good luck

[Baldrick]

If you set the video bitrate you can get the exact size you want. I don't know how the settings looks like in Vegas but you usually use Constant Bitrate or 2-pass encoding and then set the average bitrate. Use a bitrate calculator to calculate the size(see our tools list). But if you use too low bitrate and HD frame size it will look like crap, you have to test and see how it looks like.

[zoobie]

I'm putting them on the internet by making them 384x216 , around 300kbps vbr (2 pass by default) via .wmv
I guessed at the 384x216 by experimenting. I wanted something small yet noticably larger than the standard 320x240.
I then saw the 384x216 as a standard size in other editors...how about that?! I used Uleads VS11+ (only program at the time that handled m2t, there are now others) to go straight from cam to web without any unecessary re-encoding.
My acceptable quality 10 minute movie came out 20mb for me so maybe you can shoot for 10mb for your 5 minute flik. Still, 10mb is not mailable unless your receipient has a broadband connection. Keep in mind some email also have size restrictions.

[matthayward]

Thanks so much for the excellent feedback, especially zoobie for the detailed settings. Will keep plugging away - but definitely getting closer thanks to your help!

[Soopafresh]

Host your file on Http://www.vimeo.com . You can make it private, so only your friends and family can see it.

First, you must process it so it is less than 250MB in size. This script will convert your file to a high quality but smaller Xvid file which you can upload to Vimeo.


1 - Install Avisynth

2 - Download and unzip Convert_M2T

convert_m2t.zip

3 - Copy your .M2t file into the same folder and double click _process.bat to run



4 - The completed file



Voila

test2-2008_03_21-16_28_32_xvid.avi