Video question
 

Hey all, I have a video rendering question. I am using Cleaner XL, and I'm trying to render out a avi into mpeg1, at 640x480 and 320x240, but the file sizes are huge for good quality videos. The video is 18 minutes long and the best I can go is 500megs for the larger screen size.

Is that on par with what it should be? Or is that just way to big? If it is too big, what's some suggested settings?

Thanks,
Jay

640x480 MPEG-1 files are almost always monstrous.

Your numbers make it sound like your vid may be a little choppy.

If you don't mind the format MPEG-4 looks awesome at 1/3 the file size

Search google or doom9 or digital-digest.com for a "mpeg bitrate calculator", then use that to decide how big you want your files and replace whatever bitrate is in your preset in cleaner.

EDIT: Get one that has filesize/bitrate corelation

What video bitrate are you using? For MPEG-1 or WMV clips I would try to encode to 800 Kbps video bitrate for 320 x 240 frame sizes and 1500 Kbps for 640 x 480 frame sized video clips, with 48/32 stereo audio for both. Those should probably give you a smaller file size that looks good for an 18 minute clip.

Yeah, keep the audio at 32 kbits, shit even mono audio will save on file size.

FYI, I never recommend going mono audio just because it hardly saves any extra file size compared to shrinking the video bitrate a little bit and more importantly, I think it is lame to use mono since getting audio only out of the left speaker creates a poor experience for the end user.

Actually, mono is the same thing coming out of each speaker, dead in the center with nothing panned.

hrmm i have been just rendering my videos out of vegas 6 in avi default settings and then using a program shirnk & burn 2 to get the file size down

anyone suggest some toher tools to do my shrinkin?

When most end users play mono like that the volume will be dominant mostly in the left sided speakers, it's never truly even to my ears and it sounds hollow as hell anyway. Especially in cheap speakers like many end users have. When I film with a mono mic I always fill both my audio channels to simulate stereo. It sounds completely different and 100% better, so no use to try and shrink the file a little extra at the expense of the overall sound quality in my humble opinion.

It's at 2000kbs, for the bigger version. But the video starts too look bad though. I"m going to retest it with your setting to see how it turns out. (I'm only rendering a minutes worth now)