I have been recording some local gaming tournaments with my DV cam and I want to host the files on my friend's server. I would like to keep the files nice looking, but get them to be something like 5mb/minute. The full film that i have comes out to something like 10mb/minute. I've tried messing with with virtualdub, but everytime i reencode the video it comes out larger than the original. And that is with settings like bitrate and compression changed around to their highest/lowest values. What am i doing wrong? Should i be using a different program for what i want to do?
I used Pinnacle Studio to import my video via firewire. I didn't use the full DV capture option, instead, I used the mpeg capture option. I've been trying assorted software to try compression pretty much all this morning, and the files have still gotten larger. I'm thinking of using quicktime or windows media instead of divx. It's not like i'm going to put these on DVD, I just want to have the files where they are viewable and easy to share.
Try AutoGK. You can select a size you want the output to be and it will do everything else for you. Always gets me the right size when encoding to XviD.
For the best final results, you should always start of with the best quality. Degrading your intermediate files is definatly not going to help with the final quality of the output. You should recapture as DV and don't recompress it until you are ready for the final encode. Also for the web, I would de-interlace and resize down.
I'll give that autoGK a try. I recaptured the video in DV quality and I'm finding that it looks most acceptable encoded with pinnacle's mpeg-4 encoder. I'm curious what would look better, Windows Media or Quicktime format? Real's encoder is a piece or $hit... I havn't tried quicktime yet, but I will in the coming week. There are also some flash encoders out there that i wanted to try like Riva FLV encoder. I've only toyed with it so far and got really crappy results, but i'll see what its best settings are. I can't really think of anything else other than pointing a camera at a tv to record tournament games is a really really stupid idea. Even the DV quality capture looks on the crummy side. Only one tournament was able to be salvaged because it was on an LCD display. It wasn't apparent at the time, but on the CRTs, there were black lines from the different frame rates. I'll post back with my progress later this week. Thanks guys for the advice .
Are you serisous? Youre recording whats on the tv usin your camcorder. Im surpiresed its even watchable, most camcorders can hook up to a tv or a set top box as far as i know and you cen record the signal straight from there(not 100% sure about this but i know my camcorder has composite in). Also i would recomend you getting a PVR such as tivo, try this forum http://forums.afterdawn.com/forum_view.cfm/108 Depends on the settings you use, also i would reccomend .wmv because not everyone has quicktime player and Windows media player almost everybody has,
A lot of people have WMP, but not everyone can play .wmv files on Macs and other OS's that don't support it. Although I despise both, I would say you should check out Quicktime, it always seemed to have a slightly better quality compared to Windows Media. If you're still interested in making it DivX or XviD, try getting and learning how to use AviSynth, which is a very powerful and effective scripting method to editing videos. Combining the appropriate filters and commands can make or break a project, and finding the right ones always makes the picture look really nice. If you check around the forums, there should be some threads talking about the "true way of making DivX" somewhere; try looking that up.
