Would anyone be surprised to learn I just worked with a video project over 15GB total under Windows 98SE?
The limit applies to a single file, not a project. So the key is to edit in scenes which is what a video editor is designed to do in the first place.
The following method also overcomes my problems with the HSL filter detailed in another thread which seems to come from transcode errors encoding MPG to MPG. Thanks to John of SonicFoundry for pointing that out.
My original mpg source file weighted in at 240MB. If I would have tried to convert to AVI in order to use the HSL filter the size would have grown to over 15GB and be way beyond the 4GB ceiling.
So as a first step I broke down the MPG source file into managable chucks, breaking at scenes and keeping them under four minutes to ensure they would be under 4GB.
I next did my editing, applied what color correction and brightness/contrast and HSL correction I felt was needed. I then rendered the completed scene as a AVI file and kept the numbering sequence of the saved files as A1 A2 A3, etc..
I worked my way through the entire source file ending up with 12 AVI files varying in size from 500MB to just under 4GB which combined totaled a little over 15 GB for a video playing just under twenty minutes.
Now to put Humpty Dumpty back together again:
I cleared out VideoFactory, starting with a empty timeline. I next dropped my first newly created AVI file number one on the timeline. I then dropped the second AVI file overlaping the file file on the timeline. Then I used cross fade or one of the various transitions to seamlessly merge the scenes. I moved the cursor back a bit and played through the merge of the scenes to be sure I was happy with the effect.
I continued dropping and testing each created AVI file in order onto the timeline until the whole video was loaded, all twenty minutes of it, now a series of AVI files.
Note this method DOES allow you get get past the 4GB limit. At this point (all 12 AVI files open in Video Factory) you'll remember we are talking in excess of 12 GB worth of AVI files! Of course you still need ample hard drive space to create these big files in the earlier step.
To finish up I rendered this series of AVI source files as a one MPG file using the VIDEO CD NTSC template. The final file was only 240MB compared to the combined AVI files which totaled in excess of 12GB.
The advantage in addition to the huge savings in file size is the resulting MPG file was rendered in the VIDEO CD NTSC format so the resulting file can be burned to a CD and played on many DVD players. So using something like Nero or Easy CD Creator Platinum to burn your CD you can play you edited movies on your big screen TV, off your free standing DVD player!
Of course you'll want to keep the original source file in a lossless format (AVI) until you do your edits and make corrections and apply filters, etc.. That is easy if you still have the source file from your camera.
In my case I no longer had the source file in anything but MPG format. If you attempt to work with an MPG file, each time you render it, you recompress it again and each version is worse than the last.
By converting my original MPG source file to a AVI I froze the quality at that point and thus suffered no further loss in quality. This happens because once the MPG file is open in VideoFactory it again is in an uncompressed state. The damage comes from rendering again and again, each time making successive MPG files.
By converting to a lossless format like AVI, then using those created files to do your editing, breaking at scenes all under 4GB in size (about 4 min max) you avoid repeated compressing.
If your original source file is of good quality to begin with, converting to MPG does not hurt overall quality to the point it becomes an issue.
The limit applies to a single file, not a project. So the key is to edit in scenes which is what a video editor is designed to do in the first place.
The following method also overcomes my problems with the HSL filter detailed in another thread which seems to come from transcode errors encoding MPG to MPG. Thanks to John of SonicFoundry for pointing that out.
My original mpg source file weighted in at 240MB. If I would have tried to convert to AVI in order to use the HSL filter the size would have grown to over 15GB and be way beyond the 4GB ceiling.
So as a first step I broke down the MPG source file into managable chucks, breaking at scenes and keeping them under four minutes to ensure they would be under 4GB.
I next did my editing, applied what color correction and brightness/contrast and HSL correction I felt was needed. I then rendered the completed scene as a AVI file and kept the numbering sequence of the saved files as A1 A2 A3, etc..
I worked my way through the entire source file ending up with 12 AVI files varying in size from 500MB to just under 4GB which combined totaled a little over 15 GB for a video playing just under twenty minutes.
Now to put Humpty Dumpty back together again:
I cleared out VideoFactory, starting with a empty timeline. I next dropped my first newly created AVI file number one on the timeline. I then dropped the second AVI file overlaping the file file on the timeline. Then I used cross fade or one of the various transitions to seamlessly merge the scenes. I moved the cursor back a bit and played through the merge of the scenes to be sure I was happy with the effect.
I continued dropping and testing each created AVI file in order onto the timeline until the whole video was loaded, all twenty minutes of it, now a series of AVI files.
Note this method DOES allow you get get past the 4GB limit. At this point (all 12 AVI files open in Video Factory) you'll remember we are talking in excess of 12 GB worth of AVI files! Of course you still need ample hard drive space to create these big files in the earlier step.
To finish up I rendered this series of AVI source files as a one MPG file using the VIDEO CD NTSC template. The final file was only 240MB compared to the combined AVI files which totaled in excess of 12GB.
The advantage in addition to the huge savings in file size is the resulting MPG file was rendered in the VIDEO CD NTSC format so the resulting file can be burned to a CD and played on many DVD players. So using something like Nero or Easy CD Creator Platinum to burn your CD you can play you edited movies on your big screen TV, off your free standing DVD player!
Of course you'll want to keep the original source file in a lossless format (AVI) until you do your edits and make corrections and apply filters, etc.. That is easy if you still have the source file from your camera.
In my case I no longer had the source file in anything but MPG format. If you attempt to work with an MPG file, each time you render it, you recompress it again and each version is worse than the last.
By converting my original MPG source file to a AVI I froze the quality at that point and thus suffered no further loss in quality. This happens because once the MPG file is open in VideoFactory it again is in an uncompressed state. The damage comes from rendering again and again, each time making successive MPG files.
By converting to a lossless format like AVI, then using those created files to do your editing, breaking at scenes all under 4GB in size (about 4 min max) you avoid repeated compressing.
If your original source file is of good quality to begin with, converting to MPG does not hurt overall quality to the point it becomes an issue.