How to limit the filesize from the captured AVI?

[han]

Just this general question.
What I try to do is to capture actions from my Xbox 360 game-console to show at internet. For instance, I play pro evolution soccer 5 and that takes about 10 minutes for each half. It's okay to make two files for each half.
But when I am capturing the actions for about 8 minutes it goes over the limit from my partition-size which is about 4 gigabyte (the partition can have 15 GB but for a single file it does not accept more than 4 gb).

I know, I can use mpeg rather than AVI, but there must be a way to do it in AVI. I did it before with a Hauppage WinTV USB card.
This card never produced more than 4 GB.
Now I am using ATI All-In-Wonder X800 VE which is a graphical card and TV-card in one.

The way I did it with my old TV-card was to make a large AVI-file and than I tweaked it to a smaller size using Virtualdup.
I cannot do this now, because the AVI-file exceeds the limits before the movie has finished....

[2Dogs]

Hi han,

so you have 15Gb of space on your drive but 8 minutes of captured footage takes 4Gb?

You make no mention of the captured file properties but if your frame size is 720 x 480, you must be capturing as uncompressed avi. You should look for an option to capture as DV Type-1, which would reduce it by a factor of around 8.7.

[Trevor Andrew]

Hi
Just to add to 2Dogs coments -----capturing to uncompressed Avi is about 65Gb per hour. You need to use a compressor to reduce this file size.

From the Options Cogwheel select Video and audio capture properties….
Capture Tab
Tick ‘Use software compression’
Advanced
From the ‘compression box’ select a compressor
Microsoft Video 1 (if its there, give you about 13 Gb per hour.)
Huffyuv v2.1.1 about 26 Gb per hour(this is freeware-you may have to download the codec)

The Indeo compressors give low file sizes but I don’t know about the quality.

I haven't used them all, You may have to test a few to see which meets your needs.

Different settings will be more or less demanding on your pc, activate the ‘drop frame counter’ from file /preferences.

Trevor

[han]

Hi han,

so you have 15Gb of space on your drive but 8 minutes of captured footage takes 4Gb?

You make no mention of the captured file properties but if your frame size is 720 x 480, you must be capturing as uncompressed avi. You should look for an option to capture as DV Type-1, which would reduce it by a factor of around 8.7.

Yes, you are correct about the 8 minutes taking 4 GB and also about the framesize
I tried to use DV but every time I selected DV, it automaticly switched back to AVI. I can select other formats like Mpeg or WMV, but not DV... Why is that?

Hi
Just to add to 2Dogs coments -----capturing to uncompressed Avi is about 65Gb per hour. You need to use a compressor to reduce this file size.

From the Options Cogwheel select Video and audio capture properties….
Capture Tab
Tick ‘Use software compression’
Advanced
From the ‘compression box’ select a compressor
Microsoft Video 1 (if its there, give you about 13 Gb per hour.)
Huffyuv v2.1.1 about 26 Gb per hour(this is freeware-you may have to download the codec)

The Indeo compressors give low file sizes but I don’t know about the quality.

I haven't used them all, You may have to test a few to see which meets your needs.

Different settings will be more or less demanding on your pc, activate the ‘drop frame counter’ from file /preferences.

Trevor

Thank you, I wil download that codec; I only was able to select YUY2 and UYVY.
Compressing to microsoft 1 is selected now and I will test it tonight.

Do any of you guys have an opinion on my question about the strange filesize, because nobody seem to be able to help me about it and I need screenshots for my forum:
http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=9230
I would be very gratefull

[Trevor Andrew]

Hi

DV can only be selected when capturing from a digital source otherwise the format reverts to Avi. This is normal.
Using Avi you have to set your own capture properties.


Trevor

Ps send an e-mail attaching the strange image file. I will have a look at it.

[han]

Ps send an e-mail attaching the strange image file. I will have a look at it.

Thanks! I will do that in a minute

[Terry Stetler]

Other soft-codec alternatives include MJPeg (Motion JPEG), which has been used in editing workstations for years and gives very nice quality but reasonable (and adjustable) file sizes.

Most all are commercial, but very reasonable at ~$20-30. Those by MainConcept, Morgan Multimedia and Pegasus (PICVideo) are particulary good for doing captures and edits because of their high speed even on older CPU's.

All of these will give much better results than the alternatives mentioned above provided you use the upper 1/4 of the quality settings. All can also capture to most any frame size your capture device supports.

MainConcept also makes a soft DV codec, which is great for exporting DV projects at higher quality than Microsofts DV codec is capable of and for capturing DV from analog sources, but it's more expensive than MJPeg at $49.

MainConcept:

http://www.mainconcept.com/codecs.shtml

Morgan:

http://www.morgan-multimedia.com/

PICVideo:

http://www.pegasusimaging.com/picvideomjpeg.htm

[han]

Terry, I want to place some of my movies on internet. It is for a forum of a particular console-game.
Do all of the people who want to download the movie also to need those codecs?

[skier-hughes]

If it's going on the web why not save it in wmv, at a quality you'll be using on the web. Saves time in re-encoding and all pc users will be able to see it?

[han]

Yes, true, but AVI has better quality. I used windows Movie-Maker in the past and I wasn't happy with the quality of the WMV-files, but maybe there is no alternative....

[THoff]

"AVI has better quality" is a blanket statement that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. AVI is a container format, and the quality of the video depends entirely on the codec (if any) that is used, and the quality settings of that codec.

WMV can produce excellent quality as well, it is really only limited by the bandwidth that you wish to view the video over. If you use the Neptune templates at a fairly high bitrate setting, then you will get results that will be close to uncompressed video.

The downside of this is that high-quality video (regardless of whether it is in AVI of WMV format) will be large, so sharing it with the rest of the 'net requires a fast connection and lots of bandwidth. I've shared some in-game videos myself before, and used more than 10GB of bandwidth in one day.

[han]

WMV can produce excellent quality as well, it is really only limited by the bandwidth that you wish to view the video over. If you use the Neptune templates at a fairly high bitrate setting, then you will get results that will be close to uncompressed video.

Please can you explain me what a Neptune template is?

[THoff]

Gladly.

When you use Share -> Create Video File, select Custom instead of one of the existing output formats in the menu. Next, select WMV for the file format, and then Options. Here you can customize the output options, which includes selecting a template that determines the resolution (horizontal & vertical dimensions), encoding method, and bitrate.

Neptune is a video sharing service, and several of the templates that are predefined are for sharing high-quality videos using this service. Videos created using these templates can be used without Neptune, however.

My suggestion would be to use the Neptune templates as a starting point, and experiment with them to find a good compromise between quality and file size.

[Terry Stetler]

WMV makes sense for distribution only (not editing), but only for Windows platforms. MAC users will most often be using either Quicktime or MPEG-1, with the latter being a relatively "universal" format.

[Deb_Montana]

I was reading the posts on compressing the avi file to share. Has anyone found the best codec to use with this program yet? I have tried a few that are listed and they don't work well.

Thanks, Deb