Decreasing the size of an MPEG.

[bjorn]

I'm administrating my brothers band's website and I'm about to publish a live video on it. I have the original and it is rather large (2,5gb). I cut it in half and encoded it to mpeg (with some program). I am a total newbie to these kinds of things so I ended up with an 188mb file which is kinda bad considering it is 4 minutes long.

I want it to be someting more in the range of 30 - 50mb. I've tried numerous programs and codecs but nothing seems to work.

This is not something I'm going to do regularly so I can't buy a Program, it must be shareware or freeware.

Can someone offer some advice or help for this extremly frustrated teenager (this has wasted my entire day!!)?

[Morgeruat]

there's a few things you can do, 1 cut the screen size to about 320x240, if that doesn't reduce the size enough look at framerates, go down to 24 (US tv broadcast standard is 29.97, movie theater framerate is 25, PAL standard is 24) that should give you a nice size cut, but always and I mean ALWAYS save and then review the new cut immediately before doing anything new.

[Jaradu]

I've got the same problem with .avi files

[Morgeruat]

MPG's are generally smaller than AVI's (better quality too), another thing you can do is use a compression program, I use Roxio Cleaner 5, there might be a trial version out there you can use, it's pretty good at crunching video files.

[bjorn]

This encoding is at 25 FPS I Think. The resolution is 640*480 IIRC.

But the problem is, i haven't got a program to change this anymore, maybe i have but i wan't a better (read easier and more efficient) program.

I could ofcourse do it all over again but I'd rather not. Instead I would like a program that did something like this:

- I load the 188Mb file, choose resolution, FPS and such.
- Press Ok and watch it turn in to a smaller MPEG.

But all the programs I've tried seems to asssume that you know what you're doing

They wont let me load the MPEG and are way to complicated for me.

[ 08-30-2004, 02:29 PM: Message edited by: bjorn ]

[Morgeruat]

see if you can get a free trial of adobe premier, easiest program I've tried for that sort of thing.

[aleph_null1]

Adobe Premier is nice. There's a 30 day free trial you can download here. It's 169 meg.

[bjorn]

Thanks!

I downloaded it but i still can't seem to get it right, I read the help file and got some faint idea of how to do it. I exported it to *.AVI (seemed like the only thing available). But no, still the same outrageous size.

I tried encoding it with the program I originally used and changed all the settings (resolution, fps etc.) to the lowest possible but it still only brought it down to about 100MB which can't be right (right?).

I've never seen a clip this short thats over 60Mb before. Anyone has an idea of what the problem might be? What am i doing wrong?

[ 08-30-2004, 06:22 PM: Message edited by: bjorn ]

[Mouse]

It's possible that the next step might be to convert the file to .wmv format. I'm not a video guru, but a search around the Web should turn up a free or time limited shareware prog you could try out.

[bjorn]

Maybe it's because I've been doing this for several hours and it's getting really late but I'm starting to find this funny.

So, I Convert the thing to WMA, I can't choose my settings, I have to go with the ones already specified by the program. I do so, look at the file, imagine my suprise when its 6 Mb.

Well sufficed to say it was unveiwable.

But now, something really really wierd. I figured out how to specify resolution and FPS in Adobe: Premiere. So i turn it down and encode. I watch it and the quality is much worse but it is however viewable. THEN I look at the filesize, 224Mb... SO mister Premiere, Please explain to me how in the world I just made that file larger by drasticly decreasing the quality??