Hey guys….I’m a newbie at video editing and would like to ask you a couple of questions. I recently bought a Panasonic PV-GS400 video camera and have been playing with it lots lately. I use Pinnacle Studio 9 to edit what I film, and I’m loving it. I tried Adobe Premiere but found it very hard to use and heard that Pinnacle is better for people who are just getting into editing. Anyways, when I finish editing a clip, and want the software to actually make the video I always end up with either a huge file or with really ****** quality. A minute of film recorded with the camera takes up approximately 240 MB and is in AVI. It’s really good quality, but with this size it’s unusable. I tried converting to WMV, MPG, AVI and used different codecs, but I can’t get what I’m looking for. If I look at good quality videos, they’re almost DVD quality, yet the file is half the size of the ****** quality I produce. Or for example, when you download movies from the net, they’re about 700MBs, are about 80 minutes long and they’re DVD quality. How do people do that? What am I doing wrong? So basically the question is that if one produces videos, what kind of file extension should he use, and what kind of compression? Any help would be greatly appreciated….

jobby, wee, nads, look I'm dead clever me, I can swear as well!

None the wiser from your potty mouthed post what you actually want, an end use might be useful (is it to stream on line, watch back on your computer or portable media player, to play back thtough your dvd player or telly?) then I can jobby try poo to wee help.

[melliott1963]

Originally Posted by Roy Mallard

jobby, wee, nads, look I'm dead clever me, I can swear as well!

None the wiser from your potty mouthed post what you actually want, an end use might be useful (is it to stream on line, watch back on your computer or portable media player, to play back thtough your dvd player or telly?) then I can jobby try poo to wee help.

LOL!

Pinnacle should allow you to render to DVD, with a choice of burning straight onto the DVD or onto your hard disk, thereby allowing you to burn using another product such as Nero.

The best quality results can be obtained by using a 2 pass variable bit rate. Not sure if Pinnacle can do this. If it can't, another way would be to save your final footage as an AVI file (1 hour will take up about 14GB), and then use a program such a TMPGEnc to compress to DVD.

As far as why all those movies you download from the net are good quality but a small file size, this is because they're usually encoded using DivX (sometimes called MPEG4), which uses a far better compression algorythym than DVD's which are MPEG2. Some DVD players these days can play DivX files, but whilst these are become more common, they are still in the minority.

Hope this helps.

Just one word of advice. You'll find that people on this forum are very helpful, provided questions are asked in a clear and grown up manner. The way you have written your thread gives, to me, the impression that you are a young lad, who's used to downloading movies illegally off the net, has probably not got legal copies of Pinnacle Studio or Adobe Premier, hence the reason why you don't know what to do. All of which are deeply frowned upon on this forum. I hope I'm wrong, but I guess that others would agree with me.

Melliott1963....yes I'm kind of young, but probably not as young as you think. I'm 22, and do have a legal copy of Pinnacle. I played around a bit with Adobe at a friends place, that's how I know it's hard to use. (for me at least) I didn't give any specific info regarding what I wanted to do with the video I produce, because I'm not sure yet, just exploring the possibilities for now. I'll definately want to burn some of them to DVDs, and I'll also want to upload some to my server to share them with friends.

To make my question more specific...what kind of software can you guys recommend to compress AVI files with? Say I produce an hour worth of video which will take up 14GB (like you said) and want to compress this to something that I can actually burn on a CD or DVD, maybe upload to a server and let people download it, what should I use to do this?

I'll definately look into TMPGEnc, thanks a lot for your advise, and sorry for sounding like an idiot who doesn't know what he wants.

[melliott1963]

See how you get on with TMPGEnc.

What I would say is that, whilst you say the quality you produce at the moment isn't very good, have you tried burning it onto a DVD and viewing it on a TV? I won't go into all the detail, but basically, TV requires the video footage to be interlaced, whereas computer monitors don't. Consequently, when you edit videos on a computer to be burnt onto a DVD for displaying on a TV, what you see on the computer screen will not be as good as on the TV.

[senu]

you could also try a nifty cheap(ish) program called canopus procoder express
link below
http://www.canopus-uk.com/UK/product...er_express.asp
tmpg enc plus
is certainly worth a try. Adobes Premiere Elements is actually not that hard to use and although not quite as hand holding as pinnacle 9+ ( i do actually use both , in addition to premiere pro and Liquid edition 6.1) it is a fairly painless way of experimenting with output quality. As melliot1963 has stated, the computer monitor may not always be the best judge of video destined to be watched on a Tv set . That is why higher end ,semi pro and pro editing setups tend to have a tv type monitor to preview their work before final output
good luck

Thanks for the help guys, I got TMPGEnc, and it works awesome.