compressing my videos
Jan. 18th, 2009 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
guslAfter many many failures, I just managed to compress a 334MB, 3-minute AVI movie I made with Canon PowerShot SD800 IS, using none other than Windows Movie Maker (which I opened by accident). If I had to give this week a title, it would be "if you wanna find it, stop looking".
The optimal settings seem to be when I trust the program to compress it "For Viewing at Your Computer". For an 18MB file, the quality feels almost perfect, unless I saw the original few minutes before. The loss in video quality is noticeable, but really not that bad; the audio is more noticeable. A 39MB file seems to be indistinguishable from the original (to say this more confidently, I would need to do blind randomized trials with myself, which would be overkill).
The only downside is that converting all my files would be slow and repetitive. Maybe there's a feature for mass converting... though it seems unlikely, since the software seems to designed for editing, not converting.
UPDATE: For future reference: the tricky part is to select all frames, drag them to the bottom, and then Save Movie.
The optimal settings seem to be when I trust the program to compress it "For Viewing at Your Computer". For an 18MB file, the quality feels almost perfect, unless I saw the original few minutes before. The loss in video quality is noticeable, but really not that bad; the audio is more noticeable. A 39MB file seems to be indistinguishable from the original (to say this more confidently, I would need to do blind randomized trials with myself, which would be overkill).
The only downside is that converting all my files would be slow and repetitive. Maybe there's a feature for mass converting... though it seems unlikely, since the software seems to designed for editing, not converting.
UPDATE: For future reference: the tricky part is to select all frames, drag them to the bottom, and then Save Movie.