[Reddish]

This weekend I had an event where we took video for about 10 hours. All in HD off a cheap handheld camcorder. The quality was perfect. I used two 32gb SDHC chips. The video saved in blocks of 34mins or blocks of 4gb.
Th video files are saved as mp4.

My first problem is editing the video. These files are huge so when I go to upload them my computer or camtasia, everything slows way down. Can I diminish the video quality slightly so as to make it more managable for viewing online. And what are the best steps.

Next problem: Putting this online is a problem as the total video size of three blocks merged is about 12gb and one and half hours long. Most sites dont alow this big.

I have two options.

1) Picking a host site that gives me alot of gb storage and offers a "white colar" service also alowing HD video. The video host must have a payment affiliate for adds like youtube, bliptv, google, etc... For a quality service I could pay €20 a month, anything more I believe option 2 is more feasable?

2) Or Upload the 12gb video to my own website server provider so people will view the video off my own site, no third party. I understand my provider "blackknight" will charge me more due to bandwith and lots of space, but i feel it could be worth it as I can then put my own adds on it instead of google adds or youtube adds. I also feel that the best way to show the video would be through my own white colar player, which if Im correct isnt hard to code in now days.

Please any info on this topic will help me

Reddish

[themediaman]

I would say you are best encoding the video files into a more compressed format like mp4, you might lose some quality, but it probably wont be noticeable on line, and you could still keep the HD version on hard disk.......

Handbrake is a good program for this, lots of customizable encoding options, but once converted, it will be much easier to edit the video in whatever way you see fit........you could even encode in the mkv format for even less quality loss

Hopefully some more recommendations will follow........

[next010]

I would also suggest using an x264 encoder (like Handbrake), you can get very good quality at low bitrates so small file sizes that you can upload onto video sites like vimeo.com which if your a plus member you can upload videos 1GB in size.

TMPGEnc 5 is a commercial editor that uses x264 but you could use it with other stuff too, if you've already edited the video to your liking then just run it through x264, staxrip has a high quality but very slow 2 pass mode for x264 to squeeze out as much quality as possible.

[Reddish]

ok, this encoder sounds good. but will it suit me?

my video was aroung 15gb. I edited it through camtasia and this took the file size way down to 0.5gb as an mp4.

However now as I upload it to bliptv it is still taking 4hours plus.

Am I still keeping too much quality or do I now use the likes of the encoder you mentioned. Sorry, but file type and size are not my strong points!

But there must be faster ways...

[next010]

Many video upload sites will convert the video after you've uploaded it, that's why it's useful to get the best quality encode possible beforehand limiting the damage done to image quality by their subsequent conversion.

Camtasia probably use some other H.264 encoder, although it may be able to use x264 but I'm not familiar with the Camtasia software. If possible you could also edit the video and output in a lossless format then feed that into an x264 encoder.

It might might be fine through Bllip.tv though personally the best quality video I've always seen is on Vimeo.com as they don't always convert if the video is pre-converted, they have a guide for Camtasia in their tutorial section (bottom right hand corner).