Compression help

[TJRawdon18]

Hey everyone, I have a video that I want to submit for a competition and the max upload is 30mb. My video includes various tricks and movements and after I rendered it with Sony Vegas it ended up at 240mb...I played around with various compression programs but I can't seem to get it down to that 30mb limit. I shot all the footage in 1920x1080p at the 29.97fps and the video is 2:47 so not very long.

I just really don't know what else to do to compress it, as you can most likely tell I am a newbie when it comes to this. Am I going to have to re-edit the video and take stuff out in order to get the file size down or how can I play around with the compression programs to get it smaller? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
-TJ

[_Al_]

You can use this calculator for example: http://bit-calculator.com/ you put there 30 Megabytes and click convert, that will show you 240 Mbit. 240Mbit/167 second=1.4 Mbit/s

that bitrate is good for some SD resolution like 640x360 etc. , so choose Sony avc or MainConcept mpeg4 encoder, 2pass average bitrate 1,400,000 in Vegas
you can try 1280x720 an the same but quality of the picture will suffer, your 30MB limit is not enough for almost 3min video

[TJRawdon18]

Thanks for the link and information, it sounds like I am going to have to take some out and do some re-editing.

I would rather have better quality and lesser quantity than the other way around. thanks again

[sanlyn]

There's no way you're going to get 1920x1080 for 2min 47sec into 30mb. You won't even get half that time in 30mb at that frame size. Does this competition insist on 1920x1080 with a 30mb limit? If so, they're kinda clueless.

[TJRawdon18]

No i don't think the resolution matters so I guess i could try and render it out of vegas at a much lower rate? I reduced the video down to 1:57, I just struggle with the rendering process. This is my first time using vegas to produce a video (v.11). Thanks for the response

[Cornucopia]

No, you should also resize down to 640x480 or possibly even lower, in addition to lowering the bitrate. Always remember, filesize = bitrate * running time.

And use the most efficient codec for quality vs. bitrate: h.264

Scott

[TJRawdon18]

thanks for the post Scott, I reduced some of the content in the video and ended up with 1:37. I reduced the resolution to 1280x720 and compressed it with a video converter. It came out 138mb and compressed down to 25.7mb, meeting the requirements for the contest. But now when I go to upload the video to their facebook page it uploads all the way then gives me this error on the browser:

the page at https://ssl.stabilo.com says:An error occured: Error: 03 (no valid file upload)
please try again later!



....I don't know what to make of it really. I have tried to separate formats (mp4 and wmv) both of which are stated to be accepted. I googled the error for all I could and came up with nothing. It doesn't seem to be an error associated with facebook because it pops up in the center of the browser right below the URL bar. Any ideas? Thanks again
-TJ

[Cornucopia]

Rule #2: when in doubt, post the specs of questionable media (usually using MediaInfo). Alternately/additionally, post small native sample clips.

Scott

[sanlyn]

No, you should also resize down to 640x480 or possibly even lower, in addition to lowering the bitrate. Always remember, filesize = bitrate * running time.

And use the most efficient codec for quality vs. bitrate: h.264

Scott

The original video according to the O.P. is 1920x1080 (16:9). 640x480 is not 16:9. Only way to preserve the image DAR is to downsize to 720x480 and encode for 16:9 DAR with h264. Even then, the low bitrate required to get 1.5 mins into 30mb is going to be a quality hit, but it just might work. Depends on the content. Apparently image quality is not a priority in this "competition". The criteria of the competition remains unknown except for the 30mb limit. And no one knows anything about the original video except its dimensions and file size.

If compliance with standards isn't required, it could be downsized to 640x360 and encoded at 1:1 pixel ratio for 16:9 with h264.

[Cornucopia]

I know that. What I suggested was meant to be generic (though one could always encode with letterboxing). 640x480 isn't really a standard in this case, but then again, neither is 720x480 16:9 using h.264 at 30MB limit. <edit> Though, it does still fit in at the low quality end with the BD spec, or if changing the codec to MPEG2,with the very low quality end of the DVD spec.

Scott

[sanlyn]

I figured you knew about 640x480. No problema. That comment was for the O.P.

[Cornucopia]