SawStudio and Video question...

[DaveS]

I'm very much a noobie when it comes to working with video formats and was wondering if some of you could shed a little light on the subject for me....

At my day job I've been tasked with taking some training videos that were made with a hand-held DV camera and uploading the files to our intranet site. I extracted the video as a .mpg and file is about 60meg in size. Looks good but the sound is, well, from a camera mic. It takes a long time though for our other locations to download and view. If possible I would like to a) improve the sound quality using SawStudio and b) reduce the file size to something not as large - 50% reduction would be good.

I tried loading the MPG file into the video viewer but got a 'trouble building video graph' error message. so, I figured maybe SS needed it in AVI format and found MediaCoder and proceeded to convert the file...

here is where things got pretty foggy for me.... I used it's wizard to output an AVI file but had selected a resolution of 640x480....I'm thinking that was not the best way to go. The resulting file could have been called 'tall screen' as opposed to 'wide screen' (everything was stretched slightly taller...) If I stay at the 720 x whatever it was originally and just adjust the bit-rate down, will that be enough to reduce the files size enough without totally ruining the picture?

Any guidance with this would be appreciated...

[Naturally Digital]

Dave, what did you use to capture the video from the camera to the mpg file?

If you had done this in SAW, (over firewire) it would have captured it as a DV-AVI. You could then have created other versions as wma or some other compressed video format.

To go from DV -> Mpeg -> AVI -> ??? is just adding too many compression schemes IMO.

If your work is a Windows environment then Windows Media might make the most sense for final output.

[Bob L]

If you install the correct codecs in Windows, SAWStudio can directly open most any file format... so you could be using the mpg file directly... then you could render the final audio and video in SS back as a DV avi file... which you then would convert down to a wmv or mp4 format for live web streaming... the final conversion parameters would be the key to the tradeoff between final file size and quality.

Try the FFDShow filter pak I placed up in my misc downloads.

Bob L

[DaveS]

The video was originally captured on a Panasonic SDR-S7 SD Video Camera and the SD card was plugged into the PC and video taken from it. It doesn't come off the card in MPG or any other standard format (MOD) from what I remember (the camera saves the files as MOD files - I don't believe it's the same as the old Amiga MOD files...). We ended up finding a convertor program that would convert it to an mpg format. That was it.

[DaveS]

Thanks Bob - I'm downloading them now. I gather this is a different type of codec pack then the other one you have listed? Does this one supersede the other pack?

[Bob L]

I have found it to be more comprehesive... be careful though... there are lots of options... I recommend turning them all OFF at first... just activate the formats that you think you will use.

Bob L

[DaveS]

oooooops......

[DaveS]

Bob - you mentioned that once I import, do my thing to the audio, then I should export as a DV avi file.... Which format is recommended - Type 1 or type 2. I thought it should be type 2...but I'm not sure...

BTW - I installed the ffdshow files and SS imported the mpg file directly...

[DominicPerry]

I think DV type 1 is preferred, but it doesn't really matter, there's not much difference.

Dominic

[Bob L]

I have seen issues in some cases with Type 1 files... it just depends... the quality is the same... just the way the data is interleaved internally is different.

Pick one and if you have no trouble... stick with it... if there are problems... try the other.

Bob L