Compressor to uncompressed AVI for PC use

[David Roth weiss]

[tankboy] “I exported a self contained DV PAL movie (i’m in PAL land) which gave my 13min edit a 2.79GB file size which is okay but when I use compressor to create an uncompressed AVI it gave me a 30GB file! This can’t be right-surely!??”

Its right!!! Most people deliver on a firewire drive, and the client would have to install MacDrive on their PC in order to access the clip to move it their hard drive.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

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[Erik Pontius]

You might also find out what they really need. If the source is DV, it’s not going to get any better by creating an uncompressed AVI file…it’s just going to be a very big file.
I often get similar requests, often times the person requesting the files is not the person actually using them (the editor, web developer, etc…). Providing an uncompressed file can sometime avoid generational quality loss, most likely they will either be importing this file into an NLE to include in a larger piece, whereby providing DV25 or something like the Avid codecs would work or they will encode it to another format like flash or windows media, etc…where most of the compression apps will take a QT file which could be compressed with a lossless codec like QT animation.
Some times it’s a matter of providing what they really need versus what they think they want. Ask to talk to whoever is actually using it to get a better understanding of what is really needed.

Erik

[Rich Rubasch]

Here is a possible solution….on a Mac download MPEG Streamclip from squared5.com. Open the DV clip in it and choose Export to AVI. Once there in the top pulldown, select Apple PhotoJPEG as the compressor and set the slider to 75%. Make audio uncompressed 48k. Deselct the chroma sampling and scaling etc…make sure you are making the correct file aspect from the left radial buttons. And be sure you have lower field selected. Make movie.

Here’s what happens….you get a true PC compatible AVI file, BUT it is much much smaller because you have encoded it with a pretty standard 4:2:2 codec that will retain the quality.

On the PC side it will look like a regular AVI file…however, because you used the PhotoJPEG compressor, the PC will HAVE to have Quicktime installed on it. One final step would be to install the PC version of MPEG Streamclip on the PC and use that app to convert the AVI movie to whatever codec they will use on the PC.

I use this workaround all the time to get large DV or DVCPro50 clips to a PC. As long as the PC has Quicktime installed all will be well.

Good luck.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Paul Crowe]

thanks for all your help guys. As it happens I couldn’t speak to the person actually doing the job for various reasons I won’t bore you with.

So as someone else said the original source was DVCAM anyway so the file size seemed a bit bloated. Anyway I ended up going the old fashioned way and Mastering it back to DVCAM tape.

Cheers for all you help and comments. I learnt some stuff I’ll use next time.

Tankboy

[Rahul Das]

Thank you Rich!
Rahul
Editor