converting .WMV to .AVI without losing quality

[poisondeathray]

Does it matter what I name the .avs?

nope. But the code has to match in terms of paths, filenames

[DaneClark]

The only problem now is that the file size is coming out WAY too big.

[poisondeathray]

How much is way too big?

What settings for video & audio did you use?

For similar quality, expect it to be bigger

[DaneClark]

How much is way too big?

What settings for video & audio did you use?

For similar quality, expect it to be bigger

for me, "too big" is anything over 500 MB or so.

[poisondeathray]

How big was the original wmv? what was the video & audio bitrate?

If you need a precise size, you need to use a 2pass encode

What xvid settings did you use? stock settings with q=3?

[DaneClark]

The origina .WMV was 179 MB

[poisondeathray]

Use a higher quant value. So if you used q=3, try q=4. Or use 2pass for exact size

Also, you should use DV-AVI to export out of Movie Maker, then deinterlace (if interlaced) and use that to encode to to xvid. Using WMV out of Movie Maker is more lossy

If your footage was noisy, consider denoising it (noise eats up bitrate)

If your footage was shaky, consider stabilizing it (shaky movement eats up bitrate)

[DaneClark]

The video bitrate of the original file was 1635 kbps. The audio bitrate was 169 kbps.

The DiVX setting were set to "1-pass quality base" with a target quantilizer of 3

[DaneClark]

How do I de-interlace? And I would much rather encode to DiVX because XVID always gives me problems. Will de-interlacing reduce the file size while keeping the quality close to original?

[poisondeathray]

You would deinterlace only if your source was interlaced. What were your original source files?

[DaneClark]

Right now virtualdub is saving my file at q=4, and it looks like the file size is going to be reasonable. Now, how to I de-noise incase it comes out too noisy?

[poisondeathray]

You would only denoise it if your source footage was noisy, otherwise it degrades the image quality. To do this you would use a denoising filter. There are dozens of choices from avisynth.

[DaneClark]

Thanks for your help everyone. I think I've found everything I needed to know.

[jagabo]

It's highly unlikely your WMV source is interlaced. And if it was you'd be complaining about weird lines in your video.