AVI Video Conversion Question?

[Delirium]

Hi,

Can anyone help with some video conversion advice please?

I'm trying to convert a number of AVI clips to WMV & MPEG2 using Premier Pro CS3, but I'm really not happy with the results.

I've tried a number of different settings without significantly improving the quality.

Basically I'm trying to convert 900Mb 4min AVI clips to 20 - 60Mb WMV/MPEG files

Is it possible to get good results, or is relatively crap quality (video & sound) inherent when doing this this type of conversion?

Am I expecting too much i.e. will I have to increase the size of the WMV/MPEG files? If so, what's the smallest size I can get away with e.g. 80, 100, 150Mb etc?

Can anyone recommend a program(s) they use for video conversion, and what settings do you find gives the best balance between file size and quality?

I don't mind shelling out for a specialist video conversion program - if it gets the job done. Any suggestions?

Any advice is much appreciated. Thanks.

[shorey]

It depends what CODEC the AVI is using. If it is already using something that has a lot of compression then you aren't going to be able to reduce filesize without loss of quality (without knowing the resolution it's impossible to say whether 900MB for 4 mins is highly compressed or not...although for 'normal' video resolutions that is a high bandwidth).

Remember AVI is just a 'wrapper' for lots of different video formats; it isn't strictly a video format in its own right...don't make the assumption that an AVI is always uncompressed.

Tim

[Ron T. Storm]

yes - DivX and XVid compresion encodes often use the .avi as the file extension. Shorey is most certainly correct in what he states. There are many compressed and uncompressed formats that use the .avi extension.

[Delirium]

Quote:

"It depends what CODEC the AVI is using. If it is already using something that has a lot of compression then you aren't going to be able to reduce filesize without loss of quality (without knowing the resolution it's impossible to say whether 900MB for 4 mins is highly compressed or not...although for 'normal' video resolutions that is a high bandwidth).

Remember AVI is just a 'wrapper' for lots of different video formats; it isn't strictly a video format in its own right...don't make the assumption that an AVI is always uncompressed."



Thanks for the input,

I'm using the Panasonic VFW DV DVSD codec

Resolution: 720 x 576 (1.25:1),

FPS: 25

BitRate: 28809 Kbps

Quality factor: 2.85 b/ps

Any suggestions?

[sparky]

The capacity for a single layer DVD is 4400MB and given that for decent quality you want the run time to be no more than 2 hours that equates to nearly 37 MB per minute or 147 MB for your 4 minute clip.

Taking your upper limit of 60 MB for the 4 minute clip that is 15MB per minute, equivalent to approaching 5 hours on a single layer DVD. At that time DVD recorders drop to at least 352 x 576 to balance resolution and picture quality.

15MB per minute 720 x 576 MPEG2 is simply going to look very poor, try 30MB per minute and it may be acceptable for your purposes.
I'm not sure how much better MPEG4 (DivX) would be.

[Delirium]

Cheers Sparky,

What if I change the resolution to 640 x 480, will this enable me to use less than 30Mb per minute?

Or will this introduce new quality problems now that the program will have to resize and convert the DV AVI files?

By the way, are there any conversion programs you would recommend?

Thanks

[funessex]

Cheeky... but any cheap & cheerful, dare i say it freebie, shareware ones??

[joe king]

try this see what happens

[Jedi974]

Yes, Windows Movie Maker. Should be built into all copies of XP and Vista.
I have never been happy with Premiere Pro's wmv conversion and used to export to DV AVI from Premiere, then drag the AVi into Movie Maker and then save to pc as wmv within movie maker. There are different qualities you can select there which will affect your file sizes. You can achieve relatively small file sizes, so long as your bit rate isn't too high. 1.5 to 2.0 mb/s is plenty for reasonable quality web video's.

The only thing with WMM is I found the audio sometimes a little tinny. I moved onto Avid Liquid 7 a while ago which has much better options for converting to any popular format.

[sparky]

By downsizing to 640 x 480 the picture should be less blocky / noisy as each pixel can have more colour / brightness levels since less of them. However less resolution and effects of reduction. Try it and see but I have doubts you will be happy with the result.

I have used TPMGenc for video conversions with good results.

Super has some good reviews, and is freeware. I have downloaded it but yet to have a requirement to test it.