HD video compressor/converter

[Wolfala]

I'm doing landing clinics with an HD DVR that sends everything out to H.264. An hour of video is roughly 8 GIG, and these sessions go for 4 hours at a time. So i'm getting hit with 20 GIG to 25 GIG of raw video everytime. I'd like to keep the 1080i for these videos, but I def need to compress them down. What would anyone use for compression of these?

[MrRiplEy[H]]

I'm doing landing clinics with an HD DVR that sends everything out to H.264. An hour of video is roughly 8 GIG, and these sessions go for 4 hours at a time. So i'm getting hit with 20 GIG to 25 GIG of raw video everytime. I'd like to keep the 1080i for these videos, but I def need to compress them down. What would anyone use for compression of these?

I wouldn't convert them, it's not raw video but already encoded.

Smaller sizes can be achieved with .mkv (matroska) and the likes with relatively small loss of image quality.

[RTHolmes]

H.264 is a good choice, you just need to save the movies at a much lower bitrate. if you're using a video editor it should have options for exporting movies in various sizes, framerates and quality (maybe with presets for different devices.) if not, Quicktime Pro will do it for you for ~$30 (has useful presets too).

[Wolfala]

H.264 is a good choice, you just need to save the movies at a much lower bitrate. if you're using a video editor it should have options for exporting movies in various sizes, framerates and quality (maybe with presets for different devices.) if not, Quicktime Pro will do it for you for ~$30 (has useful presets too).

So with QT pro I can keep the res but just lower the bit rate? Does it do batch conversions or does it have to be 1 at a time? I've got around 100 files that need to be worked on and 1 at a time is a serious pain in the dick.

[RTHolmes]

So with QT pro I can keep the res but just lower the bit rate?

exactly, any decent video app should be able to do this. QT Pro doesnt do batches though, I'm told MPEG Streamclip is good for batch conversion (its free too iirc,) although I'm not sure if it has any editing features. worth a look.


edit: are you using a mac? if you can use applescript/automator you can batch convert stuff with QT Pro. just drag the files/folder onto the applescript and it could generate several different versions for each clip (eg. youtube HD upload + email/web HD + iPhone/iPod etc etc).

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Mind you that despite resolution, image quality WILL suffer. Compression artefacts, color slide pixelation etc. will start to occur quite quickly.