Trying to reduce home movie (mpg4) sizes for CD/Net

[wildone_106]

Im very new to messing around with mpg4's/Avi's ect. I recently got the Sony handycam DCR-PC105 and have started to transfer the DV to mpg4 onto my harddrive. Of course the files are absolutely huge and I want to be able to put as much as I can onto say a CD (Im not burning dvd's).

I had experiemented with shorter clips first in Premiere and trying to see how much I could reduce the file as either an AVI or some other format, however I had no luck in Premiere even when I reduce the quality the exported file becomes BIGGER! Then I tried After Effects, at least there I had more options to export to and I managed to get the file size down a bit but there was no sound even though I had selected the audio option.

In short though Im asking if anyone has general guidlines for taking an MPEG4 from A DV source, and how I can I go about getting say a 60 minute Mg4 onto a CD. I know it can be done as I've seen and watched alot of AVI/MPG's that are longer than this on CD"s before with reasonable quality. THe Mpegs I get from my Sony come in at only 320X400 so they are'nt huge even.

Any suggestions/help greatly appreciated!

[megamachine]

You can compress your movies using either the DivX or XviD codecs, which are discussed in length on the two sections dedicate to them on this forum. There's lots of free software and guides out there to help. You can get up to two hours of decent quality video on one CD by compressing with these codes. You can get codec packs from the download part of www.divx-digest.com and also software,such as VirtualDub, which you will need to do this work. Some people use an integrated package called Gordian Knot, but that is primarily for ripping DVDs and encoding them to DivX. For your purpose, you might be able to just load your videos into VirtualDub and compress them with one of the above mentioned codecs. A bitrate calculater, also available at the above site for download, is handy, since you set the bitrate according to the file size that you want. Mess around with some of these things, and write back to let us know how it is going.

[wildone_106]

Thanks very much! I had no idea where to start as most topics are a bout DVD ripping and this was a slightly different case, so thanks for giving me a starting point, cheers!!

[megamachine]

Happy you found it useful. Let us know how it turns out.

[incredible1]

www.videospark.com has cool info