AVI Conversion Issues

[TooEasilyFrustrated]

Hey All,

I have 15 odd 1 hour videos (a wedding) and due to issues with borrowing a camera and whatnot I have to download them all and store them until I am ready.

When I download into Premiere and export in AVI format the files end up around 13 Gig. I have a DVD burner which should handle close to this, but at 1 movie per DVD that works out to be a lot of money in discs just to store some files.

I dont want to convert to MPeg for two reasons. One I dont want to lose any quality and two, like one of the other questions below, I have had issues reimporting the MPeg files into Premiere (ie they wont).

Questions are :
1. what is the best (quality/reliability) and smallest file size format to store my movies in (that will still re-import into Premiere)?
&
2. if the answer is to compress the AVI files, what is the best and most reliable AVI compressor and where can I find it?

Thanks again.

ps. any one know any sites giving hints on how to make a wedding video look professional???

 

[GEAK]

Any compression you apply to your AVI files is going to result in a loss in quality. Having said that, you can minimize the loss so that it's only noticeable by the trained eye but you won't be able to do any better than that.

If you're reluctant to convert to MPEG then I'd suggest downloading the DivX 5 codec (get the free - non-pro version - at

http://www.divx.com).

You can use it to compress your videos from within Premiere or some other tools (I'd recommend using VirtualDub because it's a LOT faster than Premiere). With DivX (as with any codec), the higher the bitrate, the less loss there is but the larger the files will be... you'll still be looking at an hour or less per DVD if you maintain a high quality.

You mentioned borrowed cameras... if you have a digital camcorder of your own and simply borrowed one that uses a different format of tape, you can capture and export it to your own camcorder with premiere. However, I imagine that would be a great deal more costly than burning to disc.

Personally, I would go with the DVD alternative. You can fit roughly 20 minutes of DV footage per disc which means you'll need about 45 discs. A 50 disc spindle of generic DVD-R will cost you about $45 (plus shipping) which seems to be a great deal cheaper than DV tapes. If you don't like the thought of permanent storage then you can get DVD-RW discs for about double the price and erase & reuse the discs after you're done with them... it's still cheaper than digital tape.

 

[GEAK]

I neglected to mention this... although compressing an AVI with DivX will give you a video that is smaller and plays back nicely, it doesn't work too well with Premiere. I've tried it before and I find that the number of times Premiere crashes goes up by a factor of 20 when using DivX encoded AVIs. When I edited wedding video footage I ended up having to transcode to DV before I could use it in Premiere (which is part of the reason why I suggested sticking with DV in the first place).

 

[TooEasilyFrustrated]

Thanks, I will look into DivX