Video File size for dummies

[Zaik]

So, Planetside 2 has it's own in game video recording system which is as simple as a single button press for start/stop, so I started recording a few things here and there. It records these videos in .avi format. The file sizes for anything higher than 360p are ridiculous.

Is there some video format wizardry that would allow a reduction in size without a reduction in quality?

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

If you convert it to a different format, you're going to have some generational loss no matter what. However, if you can find a codec that is sufficiently more efficient, it might be worth it. There's a bit of a problem with the .avi file format in that knowing it's .avi doesn't say anything about what's actually in it. .avi is a container format that stands for "audio video interleave." For example, most pirated movies are .avi files that contain DivX or XviD encoded video, with .mp3 or dolby digital encoded audio.

Usually your best bet for low file size with relatively high quality would be MPEG 4 or one of its derivatives (the main two of which are DivX and XviD.) However, these files may already be some sort of MPEG 4 derivative. How big are we talking for "ridiculous?" It's not unusual for a two hour movie to be over a gigabyte at decent resolutions and compression levels, and full 1080P video can be anywhere upwards of 25 gigs. For example, dual layer blu-ray discs, which generally use MPEG 4[footnote]although they can use the less efficient MPEG 2, which is what DVDs used[/footnote], contain 50 gigs of data. Video just takes up a lot of memory.

 

[Zaik]

5.22 GB for 7:25 at 1024x576(what?). 30 FPS, data rate and total bitrate are 100595kbps. I don't see any relevant information beyond that by checking the properties of the video.

Also, audio is meaningless because I keep the sound in game off so I can hear teamspeak. If there's some way I could automagically chop that out i'd like to think it could make it smaller too >.>.

 

[Starnerf]

From the bitrate it sounds like the video is uncompressed. You can use a video editor like VirtualDub [http://www.virtualdub.org/] to compress the file to a more manageable size. It lets you strip out the audio track, too.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

From the bitrate it sounds like the video is uncompressed. You can use a video editor like VirtualDub [http://www.virtualdub.org/] to compress the file to a more manageable size. It lets you strip out the audio track, too.

This. 5.22 gigs for 8 minutes at 1024X576 is /way/ too big, and does sound uncompressed. I don't really do video editing, so I can't say whether there's a better program than virtual dub or not, but if it'll compress the video, whatever it has is likely better than what you're dealing with. From what I've seen with videos from the internet, MPEG 4 is your best bet for good quality with relatively low file sizes. DivX and XviD (which are variations on MPEG 4, as I noted in my first post) are also good choices.

 

[Zaik]

Awesome, thanks for the help.

Seems to have no problem compressing it, claims to be cutting the size down to 1.8GB. Should keep it from taking 15 hours to upload like it was earlier.