Halp. (Video Editing / Format pick)

[Foxomaniac]

Right, so I got 15 minutes of raw footage for a school project and I need to convert that into a manageable size of under 225 MB, The Raw Footage is 5 Gigs aproximately, taken from cam-to-comp using Sony Vegas 7 but liek, I needs to convert it into a format where it's not hueg liek PS3.

Halp plx?

Suggest format and how-to-zomg plx. (Also, needs to be easily editable, as I'm giving this to someone else who'll edit it ~~).

[Peet]

Virtualdub; xvid or divx codec. Edit it uncompressed, it'll turn out much better that way.

[Foxomaniac]

Thing is, I'm not the guy who's going to edit the footage - I was merely the cameraman.

And getting the footage to him uncompressed (5 GIGS HOLY SHIT) is quite difficult (even moar so considering that I don't have a DVD-RW - Actually, scratch that. I don't have a single form of removeable storage aside from Flash Drives ).

[Machiosabre]

so whose idea was it to put the only copy on a pc with no way to move it uncompressed?

[Foxomaniac]

Shhhhhhhhhhhhh.

[lurker]

What size flash drives? The way you're talking I guess small ones?

[rattle]

Virtualdub; xvid or divx codec. Edit it uncompressed, it'll turn out much better that way.

Pretty much ^, also ffdshow for the codecs.

[Caydr]

h.264 beats everything, and use aac audio. Xvid and Divx are known to the online tv show sharing community as "fail".

Well it's not really as dramatic as that, but long story short, h.264 is the best codec for high quality low filesize, although encoding takes longer than a comparable lesser-quality codec like xvid/divx... they're for noobs imo tbh rly.

Furthermore, everything ever can read x.264 (this is a lie), while many people may need to download a codec or codec pack (which can be doom if it's not cccp) to play divx/xvid (this is somewhat more honest).

[Forboding Angel]

Windows movie maker will do it nicely. At 640x480 you're prolly looking at around 150 megs-ish.

[Argh]

Given that you're doing a handoff to somebody for editing, meh... I'd say it's time to 7Zip the raw footage in a chunked archive, or use RAR (same diff) then move it one piece at a time.

Do not compress it prior to handoff, that's fail. You'll lose so much compressing, decompressing, recompressing for the final version, it'll be bad...

[[Krogoth86]]

Yup - as Argh said. If you see no other possibilities then pack the files into numerous chunks and handle them over even if it means you'll have to do that many times. Other possibilities would be someone with an external HDD or a DVD-Burner who could lend you his hardware for this purpose...

The final solution would be to remove your hard drive and carry it to the editor...

[ralphie]

You could make a triumphant entry into this millenium and buy a DVD burner

[Foxomaniac]

Doesn't matter any moar, problemo r fixx0red.