Help Guys Help!!!!!!

[wizz]

I have a two minute footage of something really weird i shot in the night sky two months ago. I want to convert this to Mpeg format (good quality) and post it up. I've tried this before in Mediastudio 5.2 using Microsofts Mpeg-4 format and it wasn't very good and also i don't think people without a Matrox Marvel could watch it. Does anyone know i can encode this AVI into Mpeg so that you can download it and see what this thing is???? Chris anyone??????

Tony

[DBK]

use the ligos mpeg, i wanna see this.

[Markus Zingg]

There's a freeware utility which does avi to mpeg transcoding (it's probably not worth to buy LSX for only one avi). The name of the utility is "avi2mpeg".

Markus

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[Grigory]

Indeo codec is good for 300-500 Kb/sec @ 352x288x25 fps or similar NTSC settings.
Lower datarate is unacceptable.

Mpeg4 from MS, while it is NOT MPEG4 standard compliant, is the best for low bitrate. The codec attempts to pre-filter frames at low datarate, so the image looks blurry.

1. Try to reduce frame rate as low as possible, keeping the file size.
2. Try to pre-filter your clip with blur to reduce noise.


You can try also MPEG1, Sorenson quicktime codec, realmedia codecs...
However, the only way to reduce datarate is reducing frame rate, picture size, filtering. Nothing else can help. Some codecs may be better with some content - it is your choice which to use.

Grigory

[Brian Ellis]

Microsoft have three different so-called "MPEG-4" codecs, none of which conform to MPEG-4 standards. This is the worst thing you can use. I've found the Indeo 5.x codec produces a reasonably high quality at a reasonably good compression rate. Not as good as MPEG-2, of course, but the file length is less than half. It is one of the standard recent Media Player codecs, so it is playable on all WIN-32 systems and it is downloadable, I think, for MAC and UNIX platforms, as well.

Of course, the choice of a codec is horses for courses: you cannot have superb resolution/quality AND small files, or vice versa.

Even so, 2 minutes of 1/4 size Indeo-compressed video at 25 fps will give you about 28 Mb and I'll be damned if I would download such a file: take a couple of hours! With MPEG-2, you're talking about a probable 60-90 Mb, depending on how mobile your black hole is, the number of key frames etc...


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Brian (the terrible)