Video Compression!

[XHunter]

what would be the best way to Compress my AMV which is 928MB (AVI File) to a smaller file size with out harming the Video Quality dramatically.

I'm Using Vegas 6 to make the AMV then coming back and useing Windows Movie Maker (Satans Video Maker) to make the file size smaller for people to view on the web but this also dums down the Video Quality (A LOT)

I Heard there was a way to render the AMV out of Vegas with a Loss less Codec when coming back with Virtual Dub and rendering it again with XVid or somthing like that.

I've seen quite alot of AMVs hosted here which are 4 - 5 mins long which are DVD Quality but are only 22 - 30MB.

Just wondering how to do that for future AMVs.

also what settings you use would also be apprecaited since theres alot of settings I could use and alot of them I have no Idea what they do. (plays around with them everyday)

[DeinReich]

When exporting AVIs, using DivX or XviD encoding will usually turn out very good results, while keeping the file size down. It is also what most people downloading your videos will already have on their computers.

[x_rex30]

Compress in Virtualdub/virtualdubmod don't try to do it in wmm or vegas, you can get better results this way..(virtualdub is free)

one thing that is recommended is trying to xvid and they have I guide on it here..

http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/xvid.html

then don't forget to compress your audio as well in vdub..

for audio compression use lame mp3 compression. You can get it in the amvapp. amvapp installs a lot of stuff but you can choose witch programs/codecs you want installed from it. Make sure to get AMVappAudioApps from inside the amvapp that has lame in it.

To use lame in virtualdub.. up in the menu located on top of the window.. you know where it says "file, edit, view etc.." there will be one called Audio. open that and scroll down where it says full processing mode and select it. then click on the audio menu again and now select "compression". Here you'll see a lame option. Select that then select a bit rate like 192kbps or 128 kbps then press ok. Now all the audio is set for when you go to "save as avi.." in the file menu. the video compression is easy to figure out so I don't think I'll go over that.

To use lame in virtualdubmod in the top menu in the vdubmod window choose "Streams" then select "Stream list" it should show 1 available stream.. right click on that then select "full processing mode" then right click on that same item again and go to the "compression options" select lame then choose how fast you want the bitrate to be then press ok then in the "available streams" window press ok again.. then you'll be back in the main window of virtualdubmod. That will be all for setting the audio and when you're all done setting the video compression go to "file" select "save as.." and the rest should be easy to figure out.

Hope that helps.

[Qyot27]

If you feel rather daring you could also try H.264, although that makes a lot of people avoid your video since they'll complain about hating MP4 or MKV or not being able to play it at all (even if you link to the proper playback software in the video profile - I've learned this from experience; people are effing lazy and I've just gotten to the point where if they don't care to pay attention, there's no reason I should pity or cater to them).

The benefits of using H.264, of course, are even smaller filesizes than XviD with comparable or even better quality, and over the next couple of years the format will become more commonplace as both HD-DVD and Blu-ray support it, Apple has something like 99.99% of the trailers on the Quicktime trailer site encoded in it (since QT7 came out; there's still one or two things still encoded in Sorenson 3, although those tend to not be on the main page, but on some of the actual movie pages - I think there probably is still a number of music videos from iTunes that use Sorenson 3, but I don't use iTunes 6 so I can't check that - by all means most of those should be in H.264 now also, though), and as far as the online anime community is concerned, more and more fansub groups are using it as well.