Trying to compress a WMM AVI to a reasonable size...

[ArmagedDan]

Hey all! I've been making AMVs for a little while, but there's still a lot of information to wrap my head around. I'm at a bit of a dead end, so I thought I'd ask here for opinions on how to proceed.

When I first started out, I was using Windows Movie Maker, and using A&E's guide to try and do everything correctly. Unfortunately, even if everything else was correct, there's no getting past WMM's awful export options. You have a series of poor-quality WMV options, or the enormous DV-AVI option that actually spits out decent quality.

I'd like to upload this video to the org, as it's my favorite of all the videos I've done. However, it's 5:30 long, and was a gig coming out of WMM, so I used TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 to convert it to an mpeg2. This brought it down to about 400 megs, but as I peruse the forums, I see that this is basically enormous and nooby. (I had a large filesize upload request filed a month ago, but I'm not holding out any more hope of that getting greenlit).

So what are my options? What else can I do, given a 1 gig DV-AVI fresh out of WMM and access to TMPGEnc Plus 2.5, the AMVApp, and anything freely available, to get this video down to org-acceptable levels? Many, many thanks for any and all assistance.

[Tab.]

It's simple: kill the batman.

[ArmagedDan]

Thanks?

[Qyot27]

If you have ffdshow installed, open the DV-AVI in VirtualDub, set the Video mode to Fast Recompress, and select ffdshow as the compressor (you need to go into ffdshow's VFW configuration and select HuffYUV from the drop-down on the encoder tab - also, make sure that under the Decode tab HuffYUV is set to libavcodec). You can leave it with YV12, Plane Prediction, and the Adaptive Huffman Tables enabled. Now, save a new AVI.

Next, create an AviSynth script to load that new AVI and then give it to your H.264 encoding app of choice, whether that's Zarx264gui or MeGUI or what-have-you. You could also use VirtualDub again to encode to XviD if you'd prefer that (A&E's Guide has an XviD section).


If you don't have ffdshow installed, you can download it here (the one at the bottom of the list is the newest build):
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfil ... _id=439904

[ArmagedDan]

Ah, wonderful, thank you so much. (Even providing the link! Almost too nice ^^). I'll get started on that straight away.

I'm a compression noob, I'll cop to it.