Video Compressor

[Harm Millaard]

Just get a larger disk.

Harm Millaard

[Jerome a Franks]

i have an xps system with a 1 TB on it. I plan on compressing the videos and moving them to another external TB drive. So I can free up the hard drive on my XPS. We are now in the process of achieving the videos so as long as the video isn’t graining Im ok with the compressing. So whether a compressor or convertor to reduce the file size is what Im looking for

[Tyler Leisher]

You could try Xvid or DivX convertor, or maybe look into the program “Super”, it’s free and can convert anything to just about anything.

If you don’t mind going to .mov, you could get Quicktime Pro and archive them to that using h.264, a 3 minute film of my was 11 GB as uncompressed avi, but 56 MB with h.264.

[Harm Millaard]

If you compress them, you will not be able to edit them properly again, so why archive them in compressed format?

Harm Millaard

[Jonathan Shohet]

If your avi files are uncompressed, you can use quicktime’s photoJpeg or MotionJpeg free codecs which will reduce file size for archiving, but still won’t destroy your ability to go back and edit. there are also free lossless avi codecs like huffyuv, lagarith and msu; google them up. Also noticed that Microcosm, which is supposed to be a very efficient lossless QT codec, is about to go freeware this fall, if you can wait a while.

If you are talking about avi-dv files, I would also suggest not to re-encode them to divx/h.264 type codecs, you really would destroy any chance of going back to editing/compositing them ever again.
Maybe just use winrar or some backup software that archives/compresses files in general?

[Jonathan Shohet]

just did a quick check – a 260 MB avi-dv file compresses to a 60 MB winrar archive. [and no quality loss whatsoever of course]. If it’s for archiving and you can live with the fact that you’ll need to extract the archive in order to view/use the video than it’s a good solution I think.