Video capture and compression

[sharkeeper]

720x480 at 30fps is using over 185 MB/min (AVI). What's the weapon of choice nowadays? DIVX and WMV seem popular. What software do you prefer to get your movies from your camcorder to PC over firewire?

A 720x480/30 clip compressed with DIVX to a 300kbps stream looks nasty compared to the original. WMV looks better but Windows Movie Maker insists on cropping the video to 4:3 from 16:9.

Any video people here?

 

[RyanPaulShaffer]

I don't know what software you are using, or what options it provides, but NTSC DV (720x480, 30 fps) encoding is 3.3 MBs a second, and that is the same quality as cable TV. Sorenson 3 is a pretty decent codec that can squash file sizes down, but it can really gnarl up your footage if you're not careful. You could also try MPEG-2...that is what is used on DVDs. Video compression is tricky business...you pretty much need to just try different things out and see what happens with quality and file size.

 

[eelw]

You're talking a DV file which is over 10Mbps and encoding it to 300kbps, of course it will look nasty. You're going to need at least a 2Mbps bitrate if you want comparable encoded quality to the original with WMV or DIVX. That should be about 10MB/minute.

I use Adobe Premiere to capture or output via Firewire. For actual video encoding, I use Canopus Procoder. For files I keep on my HD, I encode to QT7/AVC/h.264. If the files are for the Internet, I encode with WMV.

As for the 16:9 -> 4:3, sorry no idea. Dont have a device that records in widescreen.

 

[IeraseU]

In windows media encoder, open a custom session, then go to the 'video size' tab........from there you are free to use any aspect ratio you want. The default is 4:3, but you can certainly change it.

As far as quality, I recomend using roughly 700ish bitrate to as a starting point and see if you are happy with that.