Hi there,
I have a few questions and am somewhat a newbie.
1) If I have say a 12 minute or 16 minute video. What is the best compression such that I can get it down to 5Megs. Please advise.

2) Does anybody know of free video hosting.
Or any free servers with large amounts of space that let you download.

"1) If I have say a 12 minute or 16 minute video. What is the best compression such that I can get it down to 5Megs. Please advise"

You are asking the impossible! A 16 minute video has 960 seconds, to squeeze this into 5 megabytes would require a data rate of 5.33 kilobytes per second. It would resemble a small blurly square when the compression was done. I think the smallest useable compression you can get is about 30 kb per second, this would look roughly like this when finsihed and 16 min would take up about 28 mb. The better and bigger compression that I would choose if bandwidth were not a problem looks like this and would take 79 mb at the rate of 85 kb/second. Sorry for the bad news! It's just really hard to compress video that tiny!

If you want the compression settings I will be happy to oblige (as i ahve countless times before on this and other boards) and tell you the secrets to my compression - created with long, hard, trial and error techniques.

"...where wings take dream..."
- G. W. Bush

Yeah, 16 minutes to 5 megs will be tough to do. As another reference, the "modem" films here have a bit rate of about 15 kilobytes per second. Good compression costs money. If you want a quicktime file, Sorenson Squeeze ($400) has the best codecs (either squeeze's SV3 or MPEG-4). Cleaner ($650) has the best Windows media viewer and QT codecs. With these, you might get okay results encoding. Still 16 minutes to 5 megs will be tough.

This was a discussion we had a while back on encoding for the web. You might find it helpful. you might not.
http://forums.studentfilms.com/eve/forums?a=tpc&s=2086066451&f=1486066451&m=2936023713

edit: and as for free video hosting, this is the only thing i know of. http://film.zomp.nl/

[This message was edited by joren on September 02, 2003 at 11:54 AM.]

THanks so much for the zomp film link. I was confused a bit. They said that they accept films under 15 megs, however a 50 minute film is up there. It is possible that they compressed it in such a small amount of space.

Also please let me know of the compression methods, you guys are using.

Also you wouldn't by any chance where I can download sorenson squeeze for free. I guess that is a long shot, but I'd sure love it.

like I said in the other thread, it totally depends waht it is and how you shot it. An action film that is all handheld will be a lot larger bps than a drama with a locked down camera on sticks (with strait cuts only). Generally, dropping the frame rate to 12-15 FPS and keeping the spatial quality low are good ways to keep your bit rate light. Obviously the frame size will need to be fairly small. As far as codecs, in that super small file of 5 mb, I'd probably lean to SV3. I think it does better with heavilly compressed small video files compared to Mpeg-4. However, with larger, heavier clips, I think mpeg-4 looks cleaner.

They don't have a free functioning downloadable version and I'd be surprised if you were able to steal squeeze from sorenson's. They are masters of very complex logarithims. Because of that, they have some complex theft prevention measures taken on their software. You might have to work to earn this app.