Compressing Footage?

[GrimDelta]

Hi,

I have a film made that is exactly 2 hours 10 minutes, with a total size of 10GB is it possible to be able to fit the video onto an 8.5 GB disk?

 

[FormerDominator]

Go back into whatever program you used to export it initially and tweak the settings just so so that it will export to a smaller file. Use H.264 if you haven't already, I think that codec tends to get a smaller file size with little quality loss. I could be wrong, though, I'm no expert...

 

[escher]

What I usually do if I have a target filesize is to calculate backwards to see how many Mbits/sec are available, subtract what bitrate I need for good audio (I don't remember this number off the top of my head -- a good google search should suffice), and then pass the remaining Mbits/sec as a parameter to the codec settings.

For standard computer playback, h264 or mp4 are good codecs to use.

If you need video that will be run through editing again, you might run into trouble.

Let's see... 2hrs 10min == 130 minutes == 7800 seconds. At 8.5GB target size that gives you a maximum data rate of roughly 8.92 megabits per second (1.12 megabytes per second). This should be enough for SD (DVD-ish quality) for h264/mp4 (I think), but for HD and/or editing-quality you might be out of luck. Also note that I have not split this into separate video/audio mbits/sec.

I recommend taking a short snippet of your video and encoding it using the above bit rates (multiply by 1024 to get kbits per second if that's what your codec settings take) and see if the resulting quality is acceptable.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think 128kbits/sec for audio is good?

 

[wheatgrinder]

handbrake will h264 encode to the file size you specify.

 

[DirtyPicturesTV]

I have a film made that is exactly 2 hours 10 minutes, with a total size of 10GB is it possible to be able to fit the video onto an 8.5 GB disk?

Withe the h264 codec, you can often easily reduce it to 20%-25% of its original size with little visible quality loss, so the 15% reduction you mention is no problem.

I prefer the x264 codec myself, a variant of h264 that can often deliver somewhat better results.

 

[chilipie]

Withe the h264 codec, you can often easily reduce it to 20%-25% of its original size with little visible quality loss, so the 15% reduction you mention is no problem.

I prefer the x264 codec myself, a variant of h264 that can often deliver somewhat better results.

x264 is just an open source library for encoding video into H.264.

 

[escher]

Fun fact: Only the decoding process is defined, so h264 encoders have a lot of free reign about how they go about getting video compressed into the proper format for decoding. This is why some encoders can be better than others from a quality perspective.

 

[DirtyPicturesTV]

x264 is just an open source library for encoding video into H.264.

Also, yes. But it is also a codec, and regularly wins compression awards as a codec. Codec just means "compressor/decompressor," as I'm sure you already know, and that's what x264 does; it is true that the output is an h264 variant. A better one. We are both correct!

This benchmark page specifically calls it a codec:

http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2010/