shrinking the size of video

[subferno]

I have a 750 Meg AVI file that I would like to put on a CD as it is or as a VCD. Obviously it is too big to fit on a CD (700) so I need to shrink it down.

The video has a big resolution and the quality is still pretty good. Keeping the visual quality is important so I can either compress it or resize it (shrinking the resolution is acceptable).

I am afraid to compress it since the quality can degrade. I tried resizing it a little using VirtualDub but the color changes and the size triples. I am a newbie to this so I may not know how to use it correctly.

Which method should I use and how do I do it?

Thanks.

[killingspree]

hi,
well the easiest way to 'shrink' a movie is to cut off some parts. this is practically the only method that does not involve recompression and therefore quality loss! by cutting off the credits (or the intro if possible) you can easily save quite a bit of space, in some cases enough to fit it on a cd.

unfortunately all other methods only work through recompression. this includes resizing the movie to a smaller resolution. what happened to you in vdub is, that you resized the movie, then didn't choose the right compression settings, and therefore most likely put the new video uncompressed (or with some low compression) to your harddrive.

vcd also involves a big quality loss as you have to convert the video (avi) from most likely mpeg4 to mpeg1 (or in case of SVCD mpeg2)

hth
steVe

[subferno]

Thanks, chopping up the clip would seem like the better choice as well.

[subferno]

Ok, I got to one of the video clips that I want to edit. It has a warning screen at the beginning that I want to use VirtualDub to cut out. For some reason that warning message is still there in the final edit. The file size shrank a little but I dont know what got edited out, not the warning screen for sure. I know how to use VirtualDub cut/edit so there wouldnt be any confusion there.