I’m swamped today with life n’ stuff but I’ve got a bunch more footage already captured so I can get the next round of Sunday’s little adventure up later this evening.
I could really use some suggestions for software for making these video files smaller. I’ve been using 10 MB chunks, but am told that I should be able to get more minutes of footage for the MB sizes of the downloads that I have.
I’m already compressing them down to 10% in Premiere and I don’t have the funds to blow $600 on Cleaner right now (the most obvious solution).
Anybody know of some cool open source tools for video compression on Mac OSX?
pick an email and let me know (some are easier to remember than others): lisarein@finetuning.com, lisa@creativecommons.org, lisa@xml.com, lisa@lisarein.com…
Back later today!
I don’t have a Mac but you might give mplayer a try. It includes mencoder a utility for converting files to various formats, including DV. You’ll probably want to go with divx/mpeg4 codec, unfortunately quicktime format isn’t available, you may have to do avi. There is a native Sorenson 2 codec, the quality was dubious from what I’ve seen.
You also might take a look at Cisco’s mpeg4ip tools. They were a little immature when I last looked though. Converting divx avi’s made by mencoder to mpeg4 format worked fine for me.
The archive.org people are looking to move to mpeg4 at some point and are working on automating conversion from mpeg2 and perhaps other formats.