Very large video sizes?

nmilot wrote on 6/20/2009, 9:37 PM

Just purchased Xtreme photostory. I'm really just starting out with it, messing around with what it can do. I recently made a quick slideshow with no music and simply six images. When I exported it to a mpeg file, it ended up being around 30 meg. This seems a little high to me. I'd say it was about 30 seconds in length.

I want to make a fairly long slideshow (maybe 10 minutes) using a ton of images as well as music, but I'm worried about how large the file is going to come out to be. Any recommendations on keeping the size down?

Again, I'm fairly new at this, so maybe this is normal. But compared to some of the avi and mpeg files on my computer, this seems a little extreme.

Thanks in advance.

Comments

ralftaro wrote on 6/23/2009, 6:22 AM

Hi there,

Digital video and audio encoding and compression can utilize very different methods and algorithms, commonly referred to as codecs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec

The results (e.g. regarding quality and file size) can differ a lot, depending on what codec and parameters are being used.

Video and other multimedia data does take up a lot of space. 30 MB for 30 seconds of motion video (+ possibly audio) is no big deal at all and completely normal for some codecs. Sounds about right for MPEG-2 with standard definition TV resolution and a reasonable quality bit rate setting. However, there are definitely codecs that can take these 30 seconds and compress them to a much smaller size. Check out the WMV export or MPEG-4 export (e.g. DivX codec in AVI file). What format you want to export also depends on what purpose and medium you want to export for. If you chose the file export over burning a DVD, I suppose you want to store and replay the slideshow on your computer, on a portable video player or upload it to a website.

I hope this helps.