Hello everyone,
The question is right at the end of this post but I thought that giving some background could help. I am sorry for the long email that probably describes a common problem but I couldn’t find an appropriate answer in the forum.
So, nearly two years ago I decide to buy myself a nice HD camcorder and after reading a lot of reviews I decide to stretch my budget and go for a Sony HDR-SR5E (£700 in the UK).
I start shooting my videos in HD convinced that one day I will enjoy the beauty of High Definition on a big LCD screen. However, pretty soon I realize that the AVCHD format produced by my camcorder in the form of .m2ts files is still not very well supported and find myself unable to edit anything at all. Moreover, I can't even play the files on my PC as it turns out that the process of decompressing AVCHD is so CPU hungry that not even the Sony AVCHD player is able to do it on my apparently not-so-fast PC.
Fine, I stretch again my budget and by Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 8.0, happy to dive into the blue sea of video-editing. I wasn't totally new to it but not much more than an amateur at the first steps. So, the first thing I want to try is to compress a short video using the DivX codec. Having seen countless DVD movies ripped to the size of a CD with an unnoticeable loss of quality I thought that I should have been able to compress a 5 minutes video of my newborn baby girl to a few MB so that I could send it to her grandparents via Skype or MSN or email.
I tried a number of different solutions but with no luck. At first I tried to keep the resolution of the original video (1440x1080x32, 25fps), then I tried to downscale it and save it in different formats but every time I had different issues. For now I am trying to get my head around the following ones:
- The compressed video is distorted. I simply can’t figure out what pixel aspect ratio or other DivX settings I should be using. I thought that in digital video a pixel was just square but I was wrong.
- The compressed video results in a file that is too big.
My first question to this forum is the following. How can I render my Vegas project as a DivX video? How do I set the DivX codec so that the resolution stays high, the video is not distorted, the quality is high and file is not too big? What is the template that I should use when creating the Vegas project (resolution, fps, etc.)?
I am not even touching the audio in 5.1 as I’d be happy to use only two channels, as long as I sort the video at least.
Thanks for reading this post. Any help will be appreciated.
Paolo
The question is right at the end of this post but I thought that giving some background could help. I am sorry for the long email that probably describes a common problem but I couldn’t find an appropriate answer in the forum.
So, nearly two years ago I decide to buy myself a nice HD camcorder and after reading a lot of reviews I decide to stretch my budget and go for a Sony HDR-SR5E (£700 in the UK).
I start shooting my videos in HD convinced that one day I will enjoy the beauty of High Definition on a big LCD screen. However, pretty soon I realize that the AVCHD format produced by my camcorder in the form of .m2ts files is still not very well supported and find myself unable to edit anything at all. Moreover, I can't even play the files on my PC as it turns out that the process of decompressing AVCHD is so CPU hungry that not even the Sony AVCHD player is able to do it on my apparently not-so-fast PC.
Fine, I stretch again my budget and by Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 8.0, happy to dive into the blue sea of video-editing. I wasn't totally new to it but not much more than an amateur at the first steps. So, the first thing I want to try is to compress a short video using the DivX codec. Having seen countless DVD movies ripped to the size of a CD with an unnoticeable loss of quality I thought that I should have been able to compress a 5 minutes video of my newborn baby girl to a few MB so that I could send it to her grandparents via Skype or MSN or email.
I tried a number of different solutions but with no luck. At first I tried to keep the resolution of the original video (1440x1080x32, 25fps), then I tried to downscale it and save it in different formats but every time I had different issues. For now I am trying to get my head around the following ones:
- The compressed video is distorted. I simply can’t figure out what pixel aspect ratio or other DivX settings I should be using. I thought that in digital video a pixel was just square but I was wrong.
- The compressed video results in a file that is too big.
My first question to this forum is the following. How can I render my Vegas project as a DivX video? How do I set the DivX codec so that the resolution stays high, the video is not distorted, the quality is high and file is not too big? What is the template that I should use when creating the Vegas project (resolution, fps, etc.)?
I am not even touching the audio in 5.1 as I’d be happy to use only two channels, as long as I sort the video at least.
Thanks for reading this post. Any help will be appreciated.
Paolo