Video Encoding

[fatespawn]

Does anyone out there know much about video editing? I'm starting to get into it a wee bit and I'm being terribly frustrated by a lack of knowledge concerning various options. I know that you can get an hour of high-quality video to be about 300M, but whenever I save a movie (using either Windows MovieMaker or VideoPad Video Editor) I either end

Comments

[zoatebix]

Wow. VideoPad looks kind of awesome.

So! Video encoding woes, eh? In order to help you, I've got to know some things:

What is your final product going to look like? Is it video for web, or for kicking around the office sneakernet/intranet, or for DVD? What format(s) is(are) the video your camera(s) spit out, and/or do your other sources use? What do your export/save as/encode options look like in WMM and VideoPad, since I'm not particularly familiar with either.

You may want to download Avidemux (for Linux, Windows, and Mac!), just to have another tool in your toolbox. It doesn't do non-linear editing very well, but it has a very robust set of encoding options. You may have to create a HUGE intermediate-step file in WMM or VideoPad in order to use those encoding features, though...

[fatespawn]

You're my hero (and not for the first time). Let's forget about WMM for a second because...well, it's free Windows software. Off the top of my head, I think its options are a billion different styles of wmv and 1 avi option.

VideoPad on the other hand has a million options. I'm going to focus on the ones it gives when saving back to the computer (as opposed to burning a video DVD or anything else).
Formats: wmv avi asf mpg
Resolution: 160x120 - 1920x1200
Framerate: 5-30
Lots of different bitrates.
And then a bunch of video and audio codec options depending on the format selected.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm aiming for yet. I guess one target is fairly high-quality for replay on my PC (but none of this Gig/10 minutes AVI business) and the other would be bearable quality for YouTube.

I should point out that my experience with VideoPad is that I downloaded it on Friday because Download.com recommended it as a good free video editor, but so far I'm fairly impressed.

[zoatebix]

Alright, that's a start. Container format doesn't matter too much when it comes to file size, it's the bunches of codec options that should have your attention.

So how about your sources - what do they look like? What codecs do they use? If VideoPad isn't forthcoming with that information, there is a good, free tool for that, too: GSpot Codec Information Appliance.

[fatespawn]

Oooo, that appliance is very handy. I'll definitely use that for pre-made stuff. Most of what I'm going to be using is coming straight off a digital tape camcorder, so it comes into the computer according to whatever program I'm feeding it into, which at the moment is Windows MovieMaker.

GSpot apparently doesn't do .wmv's, but the only information it can tell me about the .avi's that WMM makes is that their stream type is video/x-ms-asf

Everything else is n.a. Probably because WMM is hateful.

[zoatebix]

OK - if you're pulling off of a miniDV camcorder, you're going to want to capture and edit your video using 5 minutes to 1GB DV-AVI and then encode it to something smaller. You can either use WMM to capture your video -- it's perfectly capable -- or find something else.

And, since I haven't given you enough links in my three comments so far, I'll bug you with even more in my fourth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dv

Finally, something else to keep in mind. I don't know what kind of camera you have, but consumer camcorders have poor optics, small sensors, and are often used in bad lighting. This makes for noisy video. Noise is easily misidentified by video codecs as important motion. Your attempts at making low bit-rate stuff look good might fail despite everything else.

[zoatebix]

I found an alternative to GSpot but I haven't tried it out yet: http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en