Help with compressing my first short to post
 

Hello all. Well I finished my first short that was completely storyboarded etc and planned out. I want to post a link to it but I have to compress it first. I have about 20 megs to work with and the short is about 7 minutes long. I have premiere 6.5 and after effects but after experimenting, can't get the file size down to my 20 meg mark without the video being tiny and quality being piss poor. I also did a search but came up unresolved. Are there free programs or codecs out there that I can download or add on to premiere so I can compress this thing? Oh, I don't plan to stream it, just a direct download. Thanks for any help!

Try Windows Media Video format (ver. 9)

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...r/default.aspx

I have a 20 minute *.wmv short that weighs in at ~74 MB, so you should be able to get a 7 minute short down to ~ 20 MB.

Premiere comes with Discreet's Cleaner. This is an awesome compression program; to use it through Premiere click on File > Export Timeline > Save for Web. It should load up Cleaner.

The best format if you want a large image size but small file size is Windows Media. You should probably be able to get it down to 1MB per minute, maybe a bit over.

Quicktime is my favourite format because it works across all platforms, and, with a bit of tweaking, you can get good results. A few general things to keep in mind when compressing:

You can get away with 12 or 15 frames per second on the web. In most cases it will suffice.

Keep the image sizes around 300 to 400 pixels. This should be a good compromise between tiny and big.

Use a good compressor. For Quicktime, Sorenson is the best.

Good luck! I'm sure a few other people will drop by in a bit and make a few more suggestions. If you want to play around with a bunch of different formats, set your work area to just a few seconds of video and do some experiments with different sizes, frame rates, codecs, etc. If you export just a few seconds at a time, it won't take very long and you'll be able to quickly see results. Once you find a magic 'recipe,' write it down or save it in Cleaner so you can use it in future projects!

Thanks guys. ... Bruce: Wow, wm9 is actually a great encoder and I got the short into a manageable file size, I just hope I don't have too many mac users unable to view it but it's the best I can do for free :D Thanks for the help. Look for my short to be posted in the next two days under the DV for the Masses forum, entitled "on the flop". I think people might like it...