AVI editing problem...

sjbirk wrote on 5/7/2009, 9:02 AM

I am new to video editing! I have a flip video recorder that saves the video as .AVI on my computer. So I uploaded my 25 MG video into magix to do some editing. I added a beginning title and end and just a couple other minor details. After exporting my file, it was 955 MG! Why is this so big and how can I compress it without losing the quality? I have tried to export it many different ways and nothing works! Help Please!

Comments

commixv wrote on 5/7/2009, 10:56 AM

Hi :-)

what export settings do you use?

most of the time compressing comes along with loosing qualtiy , that is nature ;-)

What you can try:
xvid codec
lower bitrate (as low as you can accept the loss of quality)
video size (try lower video size)

ralftaro wrote on 5/8/2009, 10:06 AM

Hi,

AVI is a container format an can hold many different types of codecs for the actual video (and audio) encoding. You probably imported material in a reasonably compressed format (e.g. Motion JPEG) and exported to a completely different codec, maybe a lossless one that will result in huge files. If you didn't consciously pick a codec (which you can do in a sub menu of the AVI export dialog), you might have exported to any kind of random, possibly obsolete, codec installed on your system. Believe me, there are a lot of useless codecs out there...

Next issue: I'm afraid losing quality is something that you cannot avoid as long as you're encoding to any kind of lossy, compressed format. There will always be a certain generation loss, even if you're exporting to the very same codec again, unless you can possibly benefit from some kind of smart-encoding strategy, which is typically not available for AVI exports and the codecs you will be using in this context.

As stated above, there are many codecs you could use here. The real question is: What do you actually want to do with the exported material? What medium are you exporting to? That should be your first consideration. Specific purposes/devices require specific codecs. If you want something for your TV, you might e.g. just want to burn a standard video DVD (MPEG-2). If you have some kind of portable video/multimedia player, check the documentation regarding the required format. Chances are, the device will be very specific about this. MPEG-4 would be very typical here. If you want to create a video file for the internet (e.g sharing or streaming), highly compressed formats like MPEG-4 or DivX/Xvid might come in handy. WMV might also be a solution. Keep in mind that it's not just file size/compression that matters here. What use is the best video codec if a lot of people won't have it installed on their system and therefore can't display your files?

If you're going to upload to one of the popular video platforms like YouTube, you can also often choose between a variety of source formats again: WMV, MPEG-4, MPEG-2... In this case the video file be transcoded on the server anyway and will work for all visitors (regardless of locally installed codecs) if the Flash player plug-in is installed.

I hope this helps getting started.