Compressing MPG videos.

[ShinRa]

I bought a Sony DSC-W1 and I've been shooting with it. The only problem is I shoot in Fine quality, so on my gig stick I only get about 12 minutes of video. It's annoying uploading only 12 minutes of video and knowing it takes up a gig on my hd. How can I compress these enormous file sizes without a loss in quality?

 

[WaryWolf]

if you're going to keep those videos for a long time and want to preserve as much quality as possible then archiving to dvd might be the answer. but if you just want to store (and play) the videos on your pc then you may want to compress to a format such as mpeg-4 ASP. you can read up on this at www.doom9.org, but if it's too technical for you i can take you through some of the steps required

 

[ShinRa]

Thanks for the help Wary. Yea I'm gonna need some help understanding that. Way too techy for me. :-p

 

[oni_666]

What you need are 2 programs ..
Dr. Divx ( 106 is the latest version, I think).
And a program to join the files together,

You can join the programs together when they are in the Mpeg format, Or wait until Dr.Divx converts the files to Avi, then join them.

Using Dr. Divx, you can convert a 1GB mpeg into a AVI file that is less than 100mb, In some cases as low as 20mb.

You can specify high quality or low qualitiy conversions.

I got my father to film my wedding (on my camcorder), on Four, 90 minute tapes, I then Downloaded them to my pc, via usb 2.0, converted the Mpeg files to high quality AVI files using Dr.Divx, edited them using some free program I got with the sony camcorder I have,
Imported them into Win DVD creator, added titles, msuic, backgrounds, etc, and burned the lot to DVD-R.

Approx' 30+Gb's of raw footage was converted and edited like this, And it took about a whole day or so.

Worked great, Dr.Divx high quality AVI's are about 95% (a rough guess!) or so the quality of the original mpeg footage.