On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 5:56 PM, Mary Wehrle <mweh
...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Can you point me to a web site where I can learn about uploading videos to
> my blog? I'm having issues. I recorded a video that is just over 2 minutes
> ans is over 345MB in size in widows media player format. It was taking over
> 3 hours to upload to my blog. I need to know how to get the size down to
> something that will upload faster. Am I even making sense?
Hi Mary.
What did you use to record your video? If you used a traditional
video recorder (one that uses tapes of any sort), chances are that
when you import the video into your computer it's being saved as "DV"
(digital video) format. This is a great format when creating DVDs,
for example, because no portion of your original video is ever lost or
modified. Unfortunately, the file sizes are huge, because none of the
video information is discarded.
To save space, various video codecs exist. Codecs work to throw away
bits of your video that aren't necessary without overly affecting the
resulting quality. This is all done through mathematical algorithms,
though, so what the algorithm decides is unnecessary may not match up
entirely with what yours eyes feel are unnecessary. As such, when
converting from raw DV to any other format, you _will_ lose quality.
It can be a trial-and-error process to figure out which codec (and
which settings for that codec) produce the best output for you, based
on a number of competing factors (final file size, image quality,
image smoothness, framerate, etc).
Generally speaking, you'd use video editing software to import your
raw DV file(s), and then convert them into another, smaller format.
The conversion process can take a long time, depending on your source
files, your computer, and the destination codec. One currently
popular codec is XviD. The XviD codec is freely available without
licensing fees, so you should be able to find Free Software to use to
convert raw DV to XviD. The XviD codec will produce MP4 video, which
should be playable on just about every computer (and certainly
accepted by video upload sites). Another option for MP4 video is the
h.264 codec used by Apple. This is not free, so expect to purchase
software to make MP4 files using h.264.
One can quickly go crazy reading up on all the different codecs and
container formats (AVI, mpeg, ffmpeg, matroska, ogg theora, etc etc).
If you find an easy-to-use tool, you can experiment to see what
produces output that you find acceptable. Then, as others have
pointed out, you can upload the converted video to Viddler, or
Blip.tv, or what-have-you.
I don't use Windows, so I can't speak to this application directly,
but I've heard positive things about VirtualDub:
http://www.virtualdub.org/
But see also this Wikipedia list of video editing software:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_editing_software
I use Kino on my GNU/Linux laptop, and it works a treat for me.
Also, you might consider the (relatively) new Pure Digital Flip camcorder:
http://www.theflip.com/
You can read a great review of it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/technology/personaltech/20pogue.html
It saves files in XviD format (inside an AVI container, with mono
ADCMP audio). I recently bought one, and have been really enjoying
using it. It's super easy to use, and it allows you to sidestep the
entire process of video conversion (though it does not necessarily
obviate the need to _edit_ your video!).
Cheers,
SCott
