How to compress mpeg files from my digicam?

I enjoy very much making little movies with my digital camera and then
editing them with premiere. Sadly I managed to fill my entire 40 gig
harddrive within a year with my movies and am now looking for a larger
one. The movies are only an average 3 to 4 minutes long but eat up to
600 megabytes each. Is there any way to compress the movies to a
sensible size? Any advice is apreciated.

"short_and_ugly" wrote in message
oups.com...
I enjoy very much making little movies with my digital camera and then
editing them with premiere. Sadly I managed to fill my entire 40 gig
harddrive within a year with my movies and am now looking for a larger
one. The movies are only an average 3 to 4 minutes long but eat up to
600 megabytes each. Is there any way to compress the movies to a
sensible size? Any advice is apreciated.


mpeg is already compressed. Put them on CDs or DVDs.

Rudy Benner wrote:
"short_and_ugly" wrote in message
oups.com...
I enjoy very much making little movies with my digital camera and then
editing them with premiere. Sadly I managed to fill my entire 40 gig
harddrive within a year with my movies and am now looking for a larger
one. The movies are only an average 3 to 4 minutes long but eat up to
600 megabytes each. Is there any way to compress the movies to a
sensible size? Any advice is apreciated.


mpeg is already compressed. Put them on CDs or DVDs.

Sorry, did I say mpeg? They are in fact .mov files. Not sure what that
means as I am not exactly computer literate. Can one compress these?

"Rudy Benner" writes:

"short_and_ugly" wrote in message
oups.com...
I enjoy very much making little movies with my digital camera and then
editing them with premiere. Sadly I managed to fill my entire 40 gig
harddrive within a year with my movies and am now looking for a larger
one. The movies are only an average 3 to 4 minutes long but eat up to
600 megabytes each. Is there any way to compress the movies to a
sensible size? Any advice is apreciated.

mpeg is already compressed. Put them on CDs or DVDs.

A 4-minute MPEG-compressed clip will not take 600MB. 60MB would be
more typical. If Premiere was used to edit those clips, chances are
they are compressed with something else, such as DV, more suitable for
editing work. There should be an option to export the final result as
MPEG or something similar. If not, there are other programs that can
do the conversion.

--
Måns Rullgård

On 5 Jun 2006 14:17:40 -0700, short_and_ugly wrote:
Rudy Benner wrote:
"short_and_ugly" wrote in message
oups.com...
I enjoy very much making little movies with my digital camera and then
editing them with premiere. Sadly I managed to fill my entire 40 gig
harddrive within a year with my movies and am now looking for a larger
one. The movies are only an average 3 to 4 minutes long but eat up to
600 megabytes each. Is there any way to compress the movies to a
sensible size? Any advice is apreciated.

mpeg is already compressed. Put them on CDs or DVDs.

Sorry, did I say mpeg? They are in fact .mov files. Not sure what that
means as I am not exactly computer literate. Can one compress these?

One can _convert_ these. Your .MOV (Quicktime) and .AVI videos can be
converted to MPEG and compressed to 1/5 (one fifth) of the original size
without losing too much 'detail' -- if a digital camera can produce much
'detail' when shooting video....

Before you ask, I run linux and I use mencoder, lav2yuv, yuvdenoise,
yuvmedianfilter, and mpeg2enc to futz with .AVI and .MOV video clips.

Let Google be your friend.

Jonesy
--
Marvin L Jones | jonz | W3DHJ | linux
38.24N 104.55W | @ config.com | Jonesy | OS/2
*** Killfiling google posts: http//jonz.net/ng.htm

In article .com,
"short_and_ugly" wrote:

I enjoy very much making little movies with my digital camera and then
editing them with premiere. Sadly I managed to fill my entire 40 gig
harddrive within a year with my movies and am now looking for a larger
one. The movies are only an average 3 to 4 minutes long but eat up to
600 megabytes each. Is there any way to compress the movies to a
sensible size? Any advice is apreciated.

Most digicams use the Motion JPEG codec, which is simply a JPEG
slideshow wrapped in a QuickTime file format. It's an easy format for
cameras to create. Look for a free MPEG4 encoder that supports H.264.
QuickTime 7 can do it too if you upgrade to the "Pro" version.

Which audio codec to use depends on what your camera uses. Don't change
the compression if it's using 8KHz mu-law sampling. That is the
absolutely lowest grade audio possible. Any attempt to reduce it will
garble it. Higher quality audio can be run through an AAC encoder into
your MPEG4 file.

short_and_ugly wrote:
I enjoy very much making little movies with my digital camera and then
editing them with premiere. Sadly I managed to fill my entire 40 gig
harddrive within a year with my movies and am now looking for a larger
one. The movies are only an average 3 to 4 minutes long but eat up to
600 megabytes each. Is there any way to compress the movies to a
sensible size? Any advice is apreciated.

Use a converter program to convert them to mpeg4 compression. And go
ahead and get a larger (400GB) drive if you want to work on movies.

short_and_ugly wrote:
Rudy Benner wrote:
"short_and_ugly" wrote in message
oups.com...
I enjoy very much making little movies with my digital camera and then
editing them with premiere. Sadly I managed to fill my entire 40 gig
harddrive within a year with my movies and am now looking for a larger
one. The movies are only an average 3 to 4 minutes long but eat up to
600 megabytes each. Is there any way to compress the movies to a
sensible size? Any advice is apreciated.

mpeg is already compressed. Put them on CDs or DVDs.

Sorry, did I say mpeg? They are in fact .mov files. Not sure what that
means as I am not exactly computer literate. Can one compress these?

..mov files are already highly compressed. As for a clip taking 600 meg
for 3 to 4 minutes, this doesn't sound right for .mov files. Movie
clips, at any good resolution, take up a lot of disk space. That's
pretty much the way life is.
Assume that your are shooting VGA resolution (640x480) at 24 bit color,
and 30 frames/second. That means every frame takes about 1 megabyte of
memory before compression, and 30 megabytes per second of video. That
means that 3 minutes (180 seconds) requires 180 x 30 megabytes memory.
If you have it in 600 megabytes, then it has already been compressed
from 5.4GB down to 600 meg, which is about 6:1 compression. Much more
compression will start to compromise either playback rate, or resolution.

Note that just playing back this data stream means your computer needs
to be fast enough to read 30 meg/second from HD, and decompress the
data, and then display it. That's a pretty heavy task for most systems.

The reality is that if you want to do video, you need a pretty fast
computer, and LOTS of disk space. Lots of ram helps as well, especially
in the editing operation.

Ron Hunter wrote:
short_and_ugly wrote:
I enjoy very much making little movies with my digital camera and then
editing them with premiere. Sadly I managed to fill my entire 40 gig
harddrive within a year with my movies and am now looking for a larger
one. The movies are only an average 3 to 4 minutes long but eat up to
600 megabytes each. Is there any way to compress the movies to a
sensible size? Any advice is apreciated.

Use a converter program to convert them to mpeg4 compression. And go
ahead and get a larger (400GB) drive if you want to work on movies.

Thanks a lot for your advice, guys. I did indeed learn a lot. I have
tried every format Premiere offers for conversion and found the best to
be "QuickTimeCDRom - 4xCDRom, cinepack". It compresses the whole thing
from 600 MB down to 56 MB although the quality of the movie suffers a
bit. I guess that is the price I have to pay...

short_and_ugly wrote:
Ron Hunter wrote:
short_and_ugly wrote:
I enjoy very much making little movies with my digital camera and then
editing them with premiere. Sadly I managed to fill my entire 40 gig
harddrive within a year with my movies and am now looking for a larger
one. The movies are only an average 3 to 4 minutes long but eat up to
600 megabytes each. Is there any way to compress the movies to a
sensible size? Any advice is apreciated.

Use a converter program to convert them to mpeg4 compression. And go
ahead and get a larger (400GB) drive if you want to work on movies.

Thanks a lot for your advice, guys. I did indeed learn a lot. I have
tried every format Premiere offers for conversion and found the best to
be "QuickTimeCDRom - 4xCDRom, cinepack". It compresses the whole thing
from 600 MB down to 56 MB although the quality of the movie suffers a
bit. I guess that is the price I have to pay...

Try compressing with mpeg 2 not mpeg 4 which really kills quality.

Tom