-
Compressing movie files for storage, any thing new?
In the past movies could not be zipped or stuffed. Has any utility changed this fact?
jmf
-
10 Replies
-
Yeah, the mac OS. right click (control click) on a movie file and choose ‘create archive of…”
-
[jmf] “In the past movies could not be zipped or stuffed. Has any utility changed this fact?”
If a movie is in an already compressed format (MPEG etc), further data compression will usually not reduce fhe file’s size, and sometimes even makes it somewhat larger. So, they always could be zipped/stuffed, but to no benefit.
[JeremyG] “…mac OS. right click (control click) on a movie file and choose ‘create archive of…””
Which simply creates a .zip file.
-
Chuck
“So, they always could be zipped/stuffed, but to no benefit.”
grqanted it wont save you any space, but it makes files easier to deal with.
By zipping a file (with no compression) you get around many of the “file name length” issues that still plague computer technology ie some mac file names/charachters cant be seen by other types of computers, such as web servers and pc’s.
zips also have some error correction going on as well, so it helps to avoid file corruption
and we find that a zipped file will ftp more reliably than the original, (especially if the file is in a folder that gets zipped, as opposed to just zipping the file)
so there are some benefits
bee eph
-
Actually, I tried a small movie clip last night using right click archive, and was surprised that a 172k clip was reduced to 102k. It seems that archive does something that stuffit cannot. Currently I am trying to archive 65 gig of captured movie clips. It will be interesting to see (in 5 hours) if there is any reduction.
jmf
-
Just the other day I sent some video to a web designer. He wanted MPEG-4 which they are later going to compress to flash. As a test, I compressed the video @ MPEG4 at the highest quality I could, then I compressed that to flash, needless to say it ruined my pretty video. So I exported out of FCP as an Animation to give them ‘lossless’ files to rencode (the video was broken up into distinct segments which helped on the file size). The self contained segments ranged from 100MB to 400MB. I then archived them and they got down to 75MB – 250MB. It helped a ton. A was able to ftp the zipped files to him and it was still faster/cheaper than FedEx. It does work, but this was a short program that was then divided up into shorter programs. 65Gigs is another story. Let’s takes bets.
I am thinking it’ll be 34.67 Gigs when compressed. Any takers?
Also, Bob is right on the money in that zipping a file helps to reduce file transfer errors between systems and platforms when sending through the web.
Jeremy
-
[JeremyG] “Bob is right on the money in that zipping a file helps to reduce file transfer errors between systems and platforms when sending through the web.”
Right. I’d forgotten about that advantage; it also helps getting past gateways/firewalls at some sites that block files with an image or motion video file extension.
-
Well, I guess nothing has changed. Right click archive reduced a 61.49 gig folder to a 56.69 gig zip.
jmf
-
That’s why I stay away from the gambling tables in Vegas.
-
jmf
please please please tell me you unstuffed your test files and they worked ok? I may be old school, but i get nervous about compressing video files (as opposed to just stuffing w no compression)
i would hate to see you get burned
bee eph
-
Because “archive” didn’t produce any appreciable results, I left the files as is (uncompressed).
jmf
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up