I made a lovely video/audio file of an operative anoscope, which has an obturator which rings like a chime when shaken. It’s charming, really!
But the resultant brief video is 10 MB and thus too large to be shipped around easily! :mad:
My photo editor which came with the camera seems clueless about how to reduce the size of the file. I can’t reshoot the video at a lower resolution at the moment.
Any utilities/tips for how to easily shrink an .avi file?
If I get it down in size, I could post a link to it for the teeming millions!
No patients or anuses appear in the video at all. My hand is visible, though. :eek:
You are on the right track - if you want to reduce the size you have three options
reduce the quality (clarity of the image) of the file
reduce the resolution (display size) of the file
use a different encoding scheme (rather than .avi) that will have a smaller file size without resorting to #1 or #2
Xvid is a good choice for number 3, but doesn’t play natively on Windows or Mac boxes. That is, it requires software to be installed for most users to view it correctly. That can be a serious limiting factor if your intended audience isn’t technical.
Solutions 1 or 2 can generally be accomplished with the software that comes with most current consumer video capture devices. Open the original source file and play around in the options, paying special attention to resolution, display size, or output settings.
If 1 and 2 are not acceptable (and they often aren’t for technical videos), convert the file to DVD and distributing that way may be the best bet. VideoHelp has several decent guides using free software to accomplish that goal.
How long is the video? 10 mb is not that big at all for a video file, unless you’re talking a few seconds long. Then, it is big, because it’s uncompressed. You would need to export it using a different codec.
You could try converting it to another format or converting it from AVI at a certain compress/decompress settings to another AVI with lower resolution and audio kbps. Or you can convert it to WMV or MP4, which are usually less megs in size than AVI.
You can convert video files for free at www.media-convert.com. They convert it and then provide a download link for your new video. You can get various free conversion programs too but if you’re only doing it once in a while, media-convert is the best.
You can upload a file for free at many different file-storage sites and provide the link for downloading: sendspace.com, megaupload.com, yousendit.com, divshare.com, and others. I like sendspace the best. Most of the others have very short retention windows or are blocked in other countries. You can also upload to YouTube or Dailymotion and provide the link.
P.S. If this is intended to be viewed on a computer only, you can get a pretty good quality end product with 320x240 384kbps video and 96kbps audio. That will result in a smallish file that still looks good even if you resize the window to much large than 320x240. I wouldn’t go too much lower in quality than 384/96 because then the picture starts to look fuzzy unless you keep it really small.
Instead of emailing the image around, you could post it on YouTube or Google Video. Their codecs will automagically encode the image to a smaller size for streaming. The result my be of acceptable quality. I had a large AVI that I tried to reduce for email, but all of the free codecs I tried resulted in almost unviewable result. Posting it to Google Video was good enough for that vid…
I don’t have a direct answer, but consider some indirect ones.
If you are going to put the video on a DVD, size won’t matter. If it does, try DVDshrink 3.2, but I don’t think that works with AVI files.
How about posting the file on a web site instead of emailing it? Then you could email a link to the specific URL. Web site storage space is much larger than single email limits. If your intended recipients are more than one, emailing a tiny text file would be more efficient than sending to each. I post large art or music files on a non-linked web location just for this purpose.
Sorry I can’t share your joys in watching an anoscope file.
But it’s true, don’t bother with trying to email the file. Upload it to a file-storage site and then email the link; or upload to a video-sharing site. YouTube will convert it for streaming but the further it is from their parameters (320x240 30fps XviD) the worse their end result will be. You are better off making it the same or close to what they require and then uploading it.
