Compressing and uploading a film

Lazarus · Post by **Lazarus** » 2007-06-13 05:06pm

I finished my student film a while ago now (it won no less than two oscars at my college film awards ceremony, the shiny plastic figures now adourn my bookcase

), but haven't got round to uploading it due to exam season. Now that's out of the way, I've looked into it, and found that the movie file is almost 3GB in size (I've produced it using Adobe Premiere Elements, I believe it's in .wma or .avi, I still need to transfer it to my desktop from the laptop). To upload to youtube, it must be less than 100MB.

So, how do I compress/shrink/de-qualitise a 3GB movie file to a 100MB one? Premiere doesn't seem to offer such a function.

I'll present the film here upon a hopefully successful upload.

Dominus Atheos · Post by **Dominus Atheos** » 2007-06-13 05:42pm

How long is it, and what resolution is it in?

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2007-06-13 05:53pm

You want a good compressor/codec. I'd first recommend cinepak, since it's fairly popular, but smashing it down into a flash file wouldn't be so bad. Mpeg compression is pretty solid too, but you might need more than 20 to 1 compression to get that file to the right size, so maybe something that's a little lossy would be okay.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-06-13 06:28pm

Cinepak is ancient crap, don't use it.

If you want a relatively simple program, Handbrake should do the trick.

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2007-06-13 06:34pm

phongn wrote:Cinepak is ancient crap, don't use it.

If you want a relatively simple program, Handbrake should do the trick.

Yes, but will it be readable by his target? That's a serious question that forces ancient crap to still be used quite often by production houses. If your codec is so fantastic that everyone uses it then that works great, but if it's relatively new and you need people to download support to view it, then it's not so good. He also wants to upload it to Youtube. What compressors can they support?

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-06-13 06:37pm

Covenant wrote:Yes, but will it be readable by his target? That's a serious question that forces ancient crap to still be used quite often by production houses. If your codec is so fantastic that everyone uses it then that works great, but if it's relatively new and you need people to download support to view it, then it's not so good. He also wants to upload it to Youtube. What compressors can they support?

Youtube suggests MPEG-4 with 320x340 resolution and 30fps maximum. They also suggest MP3 audio (probably something like 128kbit CBR).

And what production house still requires Cinepak?? I'd understand if they can't work with things like H.264 or MPEG-4 yet, but something like MJPEG should be almost universally supported.

Dominus Atheos · Post by **Dominus Atheos** » 2007-06-13 06:40pm

phongn wrote:Cinepak is ancient crap, don't use it.

Seconded. DivX is probably the easiest to use that's also supported by almost all computers.

If you want a relatively simple program, Handbrake should do the trick.

Handbrake is a dvd ripper, if all he's doing is converting formats,VirtualDub is probably better.

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2007-06-13 07:01pm

phongn wrote:And what production house still requires Cinepak?? I'd understand if they can't work with things like H.264 or MPEG-4 yet, but something like MJPEG should be almost universally supported.

You'd be surprised to see the kind of ancient, stone-age garbage these people use at times, and more importantly, the kind of ass-backwards thinking that controls the purchase of new equipment and of expanding into new formats, especially codecs.

Regardless, if Youtube wants MPG4 compression then that's probably good to go with, as it'll satisfy most of your needs. I did mention mpeg compression, and the only reason to use cinepak is to make things easily available. Even things like the indeo codec, which should come with every intel chip, are not universally supported and so many people will quickly blame you for not doing 'it in a readable format' rather than review their own codec library and see if they even have any variety of HD or DVD era codec support.

Trust me, I wish your outrage was more common, as I'm tired of needing to go back to oldschool crud just to make things readable. I've got a vast library of compressors in Aftereffects and Sorenson Squeeze, and I was just exporting something as cinepak yesterday and then outputting the same 600 meg file as a high quality 1.33 meg 1mbps flash file for my own use. It's more than a little retarded.

And I'd love to hear about some new, common codecs if you want to share some knowledge.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-06-13 07:10pm

Covenant wrote:You'd be surprised to see the kind of ancient, stone-age garbage these people use at times, and more importantly, the kind of ass-backwards thinking that controls the purchase of new equipment and of expanding into new formats, especially codecs.

Even in high school (and I graduated in 2001!) we weren't using Cinepak ... we mostly used DV or dumped to Betacam SP. There were some old MJPEG stuff laying around too but nothing worse.

Regardless, if Youtube wants MPG4 compression then that's probably good to go with, as it'll satisfy most of your needs. I did mention mpeg compression, and the only reason to use cinepak is to make things easily available. Even things like the indeo codec, which should come with every intel chip, are not universally supported and so many people will quickly blame you for not doing 'it in a readable format' rather than review their own codec library and see if they even have any variety of HD or DVD era codec support.

Indeo is not widely supported anymore - it doesn't come with newer versions of Windows and Ligos charges $15 for them. Intel sold it off years ago. Still, there are a number of widely-supported codecs out there that aren't quite so ancient.

And I'd love to hear about some new, common codecs if you want to share some knowledge.

MPEG-4, VC1 (WMV), H.264?

Lazarus · Post by **Lazarus** » 2007-06-16 02:27pm

Thanks guys, I'll try VirtualDub. The films a tad longer than 10 minutes but I can just lop the credits off. At the moment I'm having trouble transferring it to the desktop after my attempt to upload it to a friends webspace then download it failed, so I'm going to borrow an ethernet switch and try that.

Shogoki · Post by **Shogoki** » 2007-06-16 03:40pm

If you're converting it to Divx upload it to stage6.divx.com, it's great for higher quality videos.

Phantasee · Post by **Phantasee** » 2007-06-16 04:12pm

What's this movie about?

Lazarus · Post by **Lazarus** » 2007-06-18 05:49pm

I'll put up the full details when I finally get it sorted, it keeps getting away from me at the moment, though the ethernet switch is right there on the desk...

Basically, I liked the premise of Stalker (although, somewhat ironically, have been underwhelmed by the game itself), and decided to loosely base my coursework film on it. Basically, a scientist and his team go missing in 'the zone', although in this incarnation there's no stalkers or whatnot, it's just a heavily irradiated area. A special ops team is sent in on a search and rescue mission, and the film is about them.

Shogoki · Post by **Shogoki** » 2007-06-19 01:55pm

That sounds pretty cool, actually.
I hope you can upload it soon.