Comments on: Video editing bites

By: Auleren

Auleren — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:52:34 +0000

A suggestion if I may, if you are not already doing so, try checking the box for use half screen resolution when you are recording with fraps, and see if that helps. It doesn’t need to be that hi res for the web, and the higher the res, the more massive the file will be. 1920×1200 gets me 10sec or so for 1gig. Needless to say I don’t do much recording.

By: Boize

Boize — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:07:33 +0000

Whoops, I forgot to mention, the final size after editing, music etc. was 287.4mb. .-= Boize´s last blog ..Moonkin How To: Heroic Northrend Beasts =-.

By: Boize

Boize — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:05:26 +0000

If you’re using a Mac, there should be a default in-game video recording option. Using this, I videoed a Heroic Beasts encounter (duration of just under 10 minutes), and the file size of that was 90.4mb (compressed with no editing). Quality is not too bad, but not excellent (especially on full screen). If you want to check out what the quality’s like, you can find the video here: http://vimeo.com/7212718

I also choose to upload to Vimeo, just a personal preference over YouTube.

Hopefully you can find something that works for you, good luck!
.-= Boize´s last blog ..Moonkin How To: Heroic Northrend Beasts =-.

By: scaresome

scaresome — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:56:04 +0000

I don’t know about length except it’s common for a tv show to be in three youtube episodes.

I stopped worrying about compression since youtube does all the work when I upload. I see from some of the comments that something is useful for the HD option and I’d like to see/use that choice. Especially for WoW fights since everyone has so many spell effects it’s often hard to see what is going on.

Good luck, BBBB!

By: Adiline

Adiline — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:24:42 +0000

Where to start…..generally a format like h.264 is used for final compression, but you edit either uncompressed, or in an intermediate format that retains quality while allowing file size reduction appropriate to making the video editable (depending on your system constraints). Many editing programs can output h.264 but won’t ‘edit’ using it as a format. Compression formats generally come in two flavors: lossy and lossless – with lossy formats you throw away information from the source material to reduce file size (Divx, h.264, others), with lossless formats the data is converted or abstracted to allow the file size to be reduced, but it is then decompressed at runtime so you don’t lose quality from compressing. You generally want to avoid using a lossy compression format for the source material you are editing, and use only use a lossy format like h.264 as your final output. In oyur case it sounds like your source material was captured in a raw format without any or much compression – which is great for quality, but may make the files unusable to you and your equipment setup. Since I know you already did this timed run once, and blew the first recording and this is now your second run, doing a third and being more careful about the codec/format options in FRAPS may not be a good solution : ). I haven’t used fraps, but I’ll assume there are quality/codec options there that could have solved this problem if selected prior to recording. Now you need to find an appropriate intermediate format to compress into to fit your system constraints.

Are you on a PC or a Mac? Do you know what codec was used on the original fraps capture? Essentially you want to look at the what codec the source material was captured in, and if you can edit it directly (ie. you have the hard-drive space, etc) edit it first, then compress your final output down to what you need for youtube or whatever. If you can’t deal with the files as is in editing, then try to re-encode the video in a lossless format that your editing application can handle as an editing format (depends on your editing software solution and what codecs your system has installed), then use h.264 for final output (or divx or others – trial and error is the best way to optimize as different compression works better/worse based on the source material your are compressing – it’s not a one size fits all solution). How you do this and what options are most easily available to use depends on what system your using, what editing application your using, what the original format you recorded in was, what options for conversion between formats you have, etc, so a bit more information about those things would help me provide a better answer, but since that info isn’t here I’m trying to give you the conceptual gist in the hope you can find your way : )

Generally though, outing your video through giant compression prior to editing is a really bad idea and as you suspect will lead to a bad quality final product. Sorry if this is just going to confuse you more…but it isn’t a simple topic ; ) Good Luck! If you post more info in the comments (system, editing software, codecs you have, etc) I’ll try to check back and see if I can provide a more informed answer.

By: Cohiba

Cohiba — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:56:20 +0000

EEEK do not use microsoft movie maker that thing is a piece of JUNK!!!! Crashes on me all the time, occasionally the audio and video get out of sync. I prefer pinnacle studio that has automatic conversion of any 10min clip to youtube quality and upload it to youtube. That and the first 1080i movie that I ran through microsoft movie maker the quality of what came out was appalling. Since I use pinnacle studio to edit HD cam Corder movies. Since I think this movie was around 90mb when I uploaded it to youtube.

Edit by BBB – I deleted the video link, simply because it was home movies of your children, nothing bad whatsoever, but I get verycautious about having your family on a publc website that gets high traffic like this one. It was a well shot video and smooth quality editing, just didn’t want that out there if you didn’t realize how many folks might see it. Thanks for posting!

By: Menglor

Menglor — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:10:26 +0000

if you have a copy of Windows XP, just use Microsoft movie maker.

it will beat down to a usable size.

By: Neil

Neil — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:05:25 +0000

Sythe is right – h.264 is the way to go. I would suggest taking a 10-15 second clip of your raw video and encoding it to h.264 various times with different settings until find a setup that works for you. Alternatively, use an “out of the box” solution by just copying the settings straight from a tutorial. Good luck!

By: Copey

Copey — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:03:24 +0000

Quite a long time ago I used to do wedding videos on the side. I used Ulead Systems Video Studio and Media Studio Pro. The had some really nice compression stuff going on there that allowed me to compress gigs and gigs of video down to something that would fit on a DVD. Before I was using DVDs, I was using VCDs, basically a video burned on to a burnable CD. Compressing several hours of footage down to 720 megs of space is pretty impressive, and possible. And I was using a very high quality camera that shot digital video, so the files were huge like yours. And they were pretty high quality for the time. I believe they compressed them down to mpegs, but I am not certain. This was like 8-10 years ago.

There were more fancy options of course, but the price was very nice. I remember at the time my biggest problem was I was running Windows 98 and it wouldn’t handle files that big very well. That’s when I made the jump to Windows 2000. Yeah man, good times.

Also, while I always had fun helping people get the best wedding video they could get for a much more reasonable price then “pros” were charging, I realized why the pros charged so much and gave so little. Because Video Editing BITES. It bites HARD.

By: Shayzani

Shayzani — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:40:36 +0000

I’ve run into this same problem myself. I spent a good couple weeks searching for a solution but wasn’t able to come up with anything. Hopefully someone’s got a solution out there they can share.