8mm Forum: Compression

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Posted by Will Trenfield (Member # 5321) on November 27, 2016, 06:14 PM:

OT I know but some of us will have digitised precious family films so as to edit them and then transfer to DVD, post on YouTube to share with others or just store on a hard drive. I've used VirtualDub and I'm just wondering what compression others would recommend for the best quality.

Posted by John Yapp (Member # 2873) on November 30, 2016, 09:49 AM:

Hi Will,
I've always used "Uncompressed" until the final edit. This can lead to 30-40gig file sizes but another option is to use the lagarith lossless codec. It works fine with vdub.

Posted by Bill Brandenstein (Member # 892) on November 30, 2016, 12:00 PM:

I highly recommend Lagarith because it's compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit operations, and it's truly lossless.

However, it's a bit awkward for archiving due to the file size. XVid is a good open-source codec compatible with VirtualDub, and with the quality slider set to "1" (maximum), is decent looking and space-efficient. But consider that a lossy destination-only solution, just like mp3 or Dolby Digital is for audio.

Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on November 30, 2016, 12:04 PM:

I am too much the car guy here.

-I saw "compression" and I thought you were talking about cylinder heads, domed pistons and high octane gas!

(Carry On!)

Posted by Will Trenfield (Member # 5321) on November 30, 2016, 06:57 PM:

LOL, Steve. Thanks John and Bill. I started digitising my films using the old method of projecting onto a white card (I now know that a grey one would have been better). The image was captured using an old analogue camcorder with the output fed to a Dazzle analogue to digital converter. The software with it was designed to transfer video tape recordings to DVD but you could save to a hard disk instead so I ended up with some hefty VOB files which I converted to AVI format. When editing with VirtualDub, I've been using the X264Fw codec which produces compact files suitable for uploading to YouTube. I tried using the ffdshow codec which resulted in far larger files. The Largarith codec seems to do the same and both are considerably larger than the original AVI one. The XVid one produces only slightly larger files than The X264Fw one when I experimented. I take it that it's a question of the quality you what to achieve for whatever you want to do with the video files.

Posted by Andrew Woodcock (Member # 3260) on November 30, 2016, 07:03 PM:

No Will, you were right in the first instance, white card is THE best for traditional projection...why would anyone want anything else???????

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