Compressed AVI vs WMV

Anders wrote on 5/15/2002, 12:15 PM
After hearing all the great things about VF2 I jumped ship from VW5. The most important thing for me is to be able to create a reasonably sized file (fits on and plays from a CD) preferably in a format that most computers can read (without having do download codecs etc). I have found AVI files are pretty much universal. After purchasing VF2 (had to buy it to "make movie" to see results) I find that I cannot create compressed AVI's only compressed WMV files. Am I missing something here.

Thanks

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 5/15/2002, 2:36 PM
Choose File, Make Movie, Write your movie to file on your disk, Advanced Render. Set the Save as type to Video for Windows (*.avi) and click Custom, and the Video tab at the bottom of the Custom Settings window. Look for the Video format pulldown menu. You should see a listing of all the AVI codecs you have installed on your computer. You can also choose a smaller frame size, slower frame rate, etc. to shrink the output file size. Keep in mind that only uncompressed .avi files are relatively universal. DV is almost as popular as Microsoft includes a codec with windows. Any other codecs you use will of course require that the viewer has that same codec installed on their computer.

Probably the most universal compressed format is MPEG-1 since this one isn't platform/OS specific.
Anders wrote on 5/15/2002, 3:17 PM
Thank you, I didn't see the custom button. The compressed AVI files I've created with VW5 used the "Microsoft MPEG-4 Video Codec V1 compressor" which probably comes with Windows Media player (or it downloads silently in the background and I never noticed when testing on different computers). Yes I've alienated Mac users (Quicktime) and the MPEG-1 just look terrible no matter what I do. The DV (uncompressed AVI) creates GB files which I can not burn to CD.

Again, thanks
NinjaGrinch wrote on 5/24/2002, 6:30 AM
Just gonna throw this out there:
I believe that .wmv files use Microsoft's latest version of their MPEG-4 codec, except that it uses .wma for the audio. So if you're debating between .wmv and .avi compressed with MS MPEG-4 v1, you'll probably get better results and smaller file sizes with .wmv. And if you're depending on users to have a recent version of Windows Media Player installed for MPEG-4 compatibility, then the .wmv codec would also be available, so you may as well use .wmv.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong here.

-NinjaGrinch