A movie editor I am not.

August 12, 2008 11:31 AM

I have a project I just completed for my MEdu program. As part of that I created a video. I recorded it on my Panasonic SDR-H18 camera, edited it with the ImageMixer3 crap software that came with the camera and joined two clips into the movie I wanted. The problem? The end result seems too large to upload anywhere. The video is just under 1 GB. So I broke the video up into parts 1 and 2, 790 MB and 227 MB respectfully. I still can't upload even the smaller clip.

I have tried YouTube, my own website, the school's website. I just can't upload it anywhere.

So long story short, what am I doing wrong? I'm assuming it is related to the size of the clips.
I'm using Verizon DSL to upload, is there a limit to how much I can send to a website? I have plenty of storage space for the video on my webpage.
Is this whole thing just an exercise in futility?
Obviously I don't want to go spend a ton of money on some fancy software or hosting membership, since this is for a class that ends next week. However it is an online class and people from all over the US need to be able to access it.

I'm fairly tech savvy but inexperienced in this particular area.
Home PC is Windows XP.

Thanks in advanc for any help and suggestions!

posted by sisflit to computers & internet (16 comments total)

A few questions: what is the duration of the project and what are the dimensions of the video?

I don't know anything about that particular software, but you (especially if you were to put something on YouTube) can probably make the dimensions of your project much smaller and reduce the file size a bit.
posted by stefnet at 11:39 AM on August 12, 2008

You can upload it to the Internet Archive.
posted by rajbot at 11:41 AM on August 12, 2008

How long is the video? What format is it in? If you want to upload it to YouTube, you probably will need to make it a little smaller. Higher compression might help. Even 227 MB is pretty large to try to upload over DSL.
posted by demiurge at 11:41 AM on August 12, 2008

Oh, I didn't read the more inside, sorry. I thought the problem was max size limit of your host.
posted by rajbot at 11:42 AM on August 12, 2008

How long is your video and at what resolution does it need to be? Where do you need to upload it to? Do you know what audio and video compression options your software used? "What you're doing wrong" depends on what you're trying to do.
posted by xbonesgt at 11:45 AM on August 12, 2008

How long is the video? I'm betting the crap software that came with the camera used a pretty old / inefficient codec, so you could re-encode it with a better codec, perhaps xvid or DivX and get it down to a more reasonable size.

Applications like VirtualDub for windows or AviDemux on Linux make it very easy to quickly re-encode video.

As for hosting, Vimeo generally seems to have better video quality than YouTube or Google Video, last I checked you could upload something like 250 Megs a week there.

On preview: as Stefnet said, you can drop the resolution down in addition to using a more powerful codec to help get the size down.
posted by jjb at 11:45 AM on August 12, 2008

You need to use a different codec and reduce the size of the image.

See if you can import the movie into Windows Movie Maker and then use WMM's export settings for the internet/web. That should cut the size down a lot. Quality will suffer somewhat but you should be able to upload it.
posted by GuyZero at 11:46 AM on August 12, 2008

Hmmm. I would have assumed that you were hitting a max-file-size limit, but you are trying to upload to your school's website, I guess that isn't it.

My suspicion then is that you are using an http-based uploader, which is timing out. Most video hosting services use http-based uploads, because it user-friendly. For uploading huge video, you might have to upload with a different protocol, like ftp or sftp. Your school's helpdesk can probably help you with this.

This is assuming you want to preserve quality and don't want to compress the thing down to a more managable size, of course.
posted by rajbot at 11:50 AM on August 12, 2008

Part 1 is 22:45. Part 2 is 6:20.

File format MPEG-2
Image size 704x480
Audio format Dolby Digital

Thanks!
posted by sisflit at 11:50 AM on August 12, 2008

I can't import it into Windows Movie Maker - I tried. I'm assuming that is because the camera records in DVD format? WMM doesn't even recognize my camera.
posted by sisflit at 11:53 AM on August 12, 2008

Huh. Well, MPEG-2 is part of your problem. High quality but very, very big. Also, that's a full NTSC frame you've got there. But if you play it back on Windows then you should be able to import it into WMM. Try virtualdub per rajbot's comment. Re-encode in WMV or MPEG-4 or nearly anything. And cut the resolution down to 352x240. That should be a very reasonable size.
posted by GuyZero at 12:02 PM on August 12, 2008

"Part 1.mpg could not be imported. An interface has too many methods to fire events from"

That is the error I get trying to import the completed video into WMM - and it doesn't recognize the raw video copied directly from the camera (dropped first onto the desktop).

Quality is not a huge concern, I would like my classmates to be able to hear and see the video, that's all. I would ideally like it on my own webpage but I can link to it if necessary.

I will check out xvid to see if I can shrink it at all, and I do think the http uploader is timing out as rajbot said.

Thanks for the help so far!
posted by sisflit at 12:04 PM on August 12, 2008

I believe YouTube videos are at some strange size like 425x318. Can you export a movie from ImageMixer 3 at that size, using MPEG 4 compression and mp3 audio? It should be substantially smaller.
posted by demiurge at 12:09 PM on August 12, 2008

Zamzar is a free online service that will allow you to convert it Youtube dimensions as well as many other formats.

Choose the 'flv' format if you want to upload it directly to Youtube.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 12:11 PM on August 12, 2008

If you find someone with any real program (FCP, adobe premiere, etc), they should be able to output you a web friendly version very quickly (on a decent computer, they should be able to pop it out in hours or minutes). My guess is you'll want something like h264 with the dimensions of 320x240. Barring finding a friend with final cut pro, I'm a mac user and know there are a lot of free mac programs that can convert/compress your video; you'll probably be able to find a pc version. On the google, I found this: http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/ and output it to the h264 320 by 240.
Good luck.
posted by history is a weapon at 12:14 PM on August 12, 2008

I guess I'm dumb, but I couldn't figure out xvid or virtualdub.

My Google search for my stupid camera software turned up a link for AVS Video Converter and I downloaded the trial. Worked like a dream other than the unregistered watermark. So I paid my $40 (24 hours ago) and I am still waiting for my registration code so I can upload the video without the "I am a deadbeat and I steal shit" mark on my project.

Thanks to all and maybe someday I'll learn how to use the stuff you all spent valuable time telling me about.
posted by sisflit at 10:50 PM on August 15, 2008