FRAPS out put is large.

my 30 second vid captures are 500 megs

i would like to c0mpress them a bit but not to the point of the extra horrible crappy likes of a youtube

what programs do you use to compress your movies and how much do you compress them so they are smaller but do not look crappy



thanks for your help

virtualdub

To elaborate just a touch more than Geuis

If you want to make the raw footage captured from within SL a smaller footprint on your System/HD, you can use one of it's various codex, or you could reduce the capture footprint/screen realestate (resolution) by either using a capture zone window/area rather than capture the whole screen/window, or by lowering the resolution of your monitor.
I personally capture in AVI raw format, it gives me greater flexibility at editing stage.

Prior to rendering your footage, assess what target audience the media is going to reach, and it's purpose. For instance if the media has to show high definition/detail, then producing a small size (resolution) movie with high quality, will survive greater rescaling than a larger poorer quality movie. To reduce the finished size of the movie, use a threshold of 100kbps as your goal, you don't have to squeeze the movie with heavy codex settings, as this has a biproduct effect on the rendering system. The more you compress, the greater system resources are used to decompress when being viewed. No point having a movie being delivered in a few seconds only to keep stalling as the receiver struggles to decompress on the fly from the cache.

Use round pixel settings in the rendering software, using square pixels will not recale well and you will end up with a 'YouTube - flv' quality by default. Lower the colour bit depth of the rendered movie. If you have sound tracks included, render those at 16 bit stereo.
If you STILL need to apply a codex, do so on various copies of the orginal render movie from the rendering software. That way you can always make adjustments to the codex settings to acheive the balance of quality against download bit rate.

If you find that you cannot acheive a good balance, go back to your rendering software and make adjustments to the elements I described, and render a new copy, again checking quality before applying any codex. Doing this in small stages, will get better results than applying a single codex and slamming the slider to 40-50% (which is basically what the YouTube/Shockwave flv codex does). The codex is based on the jpg compression routines, the more compression of the picture, the greater the pixelation and fuzzy pallet blending.

Exactly what software you use, is a matter of choice and no doubt great debate.

Hope that helps?

i used fraps and the vid's look awesome but way to big

i downloaded the divx converter to try to compress them but

fail


i downloaded virtualdub and played around with tried to compress it

the final result was a file 4.2 gigs....i think i am doing this wrong

If you want something really simple, just drag onto this, select a profile, and go.
http://www.divx.com/divx/windows/converter/

FRAPS output is large for a reason. High quality, good speed. You usually dont need to keep the raw footage after you're done anyway.

My production process:

1)FRAPS -> uncompressed AVI
2)raw footage -> Adobe Premiere Pro
3)editing, production, music, magical awesomeness pixie dust...
4)export highest quality version as an uncompressed AVI from Premiere
5)final render in Quicktime Pro, h.264 mp4
6)happy with results? -> toss out big gigabyte raw files

WOW, and i thought my 30 seconds was big at 140 megs.
mayby my 800x600 resolution accounts for my smaller file size.

Hmm, you do have 'Half Size Video' enabled in the Movies tab? And perhaps 15fps set as well maximum?

I can dump almost 10 minutes of video in 500 megs with those settings.

half-size?
/me opens fraps and checks...
oh cool i can make the smaller too (i had fs and 10fps) ty.

guys, listen to me. dont worry about the intemediary file sizes. just make your movies, and render them out properly, and everything comes out nice and small. trust me.

Its true, the better quality and size of raw data you have to play with at post production stage, the better scope you will have to render to whatever finished format size you require. I see ppls getting worried about 10 minutes of footage taking 500mb of HD space, worrying about HD space limitation, can stunt your creativity. HD space is cheap these days. I appreciate not everyone can afford to host 2tb of HD space, but getting to raw footage is my primary concern.

Having enough good quality footage when I shutdown SL and open my post production software, whithout getting to stages where I'd wished I have just made that one or two clips just that little longer or perhaps bigger in screen size, is not what I like to be feeling, especially when you have just spent an hour shooting a wedding, you can't ask everyone to come back so you can grab the odd scene again .

Once I have rendered the whole movie and I end up with a AVI file that I am very pleased with, I'll create a 'preview' version to show the client, if they are also happy, I re-render with all the bells and whistles applied. After a week, I wipe all the raw data and defrag the HD's ready for the next wave. The AVI rendered finish file, is then transferred to another system, ready for codex profile stacking, before being hosted.