MPG video with sound

DVDeviations wrote on 8/7/2006, 11:31 AM
Hello everyone,

A good friend of mine died recently when his Cesna had a problem. A memorial website has been posted and I have created a Windows Media file to post there, but it is 22mb, so I am not able to post it.

Is there a way to create an MPEG video file which includes audio in Vegas 6.0? I have seen some "joke" videos which are played in Windows Media player and they are sometimes MPEG format and include audio.

I am hoping that by making an MPEG file, I can reduce the size of the file, but maintain the quality. Reducing the quality of the video is not an option, since some of the footage is waterski footage and will
not look good at a lower quality.

Thanks,
Colleen

Comments

birdcat wrote on 8/7/2006, 11:58 AM
Hi Colleen -

Sorry to hear about your friend.

You could take your video (assuming it's 100MB or less and runs for 10 minutes or less) and post it to www.youtube.com. They will convert it and allow you to embed the video on other websites (you can look at my personal web page for an example).

Bruce
Chienworks wrote on 8/7/2006, 12:16 PM
Of course you can render MPEG with audio. This is the default for most MPEG templates. It's only when rendering for DVD that it is recommended that the audio be rendered separately.

However, i think you'll find that for any given smaller file size, WMV is much better quality than MPEG. The difference is even greater with more compression. So i would not recommend switching from WMV to MPEG as you'll end up with a larger file to maintain the same quality.

How long is the video? If we know that we can help you decide if your 22MB file size is on track or if you should be able to get it significantly smaller. What bitrate did you use when encoding to WMV? What other settings did you choose?
John_Cline wrote on 8/7/2006, 12:39 PM
So sorry to hear about your friend.

At lower bitrates, Windows Media (.WMV) will always look better than MPEG (either MPG1 or MPEG2.) In order to make a file of a fixed length smaller in filesize, you must reduce the bitrate. Filesize is entirely determined by the length of the video multiplied by the bitrate.

You have a few options to keep the video quailty at an acceptable level, either decrease the image size or lower the framerate. 320x240 is about as small as you want to go, but you can reduce the framerate from 29.97 to 14.985 so there is only half as much data to encode. Of course, it will make the video a little jerky, particularly on the high-motion stuff, but it may be an acceptable tradeoff.

The third option is to download the free Windows Media Encoder software from Microsoft and do a 2-pass encoding. For example, you can set the average bitrate to 256k with a maximum of 512k, the scenes that don't need the extra bitrate will be encoded using fewer bits and the resulting saving in bits there can be used to throw some extra bits at the high-motion scenes and make them look better than they would if you encoded the video at a constant bitrate.

John
DVDeviations wrote on 8/7/2006, 1:23 PM
Hello everyone,

Thanks so much for the help. The video is 11 minutes long. In Vegas, I rendered it as 265 KBS, quality: best

I will try to post it on utube and put a link on the page. I will also review the other recommendations, hopefully one of them will work for me.

I wasn't sure if the windows media file was better than mpeg, it sounds like you all are saying windows media file is better, so I will keep this format.

Thanks,
Colleen
birdcat wrote on 8/7/2006, 2:02 PM
Hi Colleen -

Sorry but if it's 11 minutes, YouTube will reject it. There are other options such as putfile.com or google video but I have not used those services and don't know what their requirements are.

Best of luck.

Bruce
DVDeviations wrote on 8/7/2006, 2:18 PM
Hi Birdcat,

Oh, I figured I could edit it down to a bit less than 10 minutes, that is not a problem.

Thanks again,
Colleen