help with simple video editing please... my "shortened" videos end up 10x as big

Tech Support Forum General Software
1

I’m trying to edit some video files that I recorded. All I want is to take a video and cut out the beginning and the end of it to make it into a new video file which is only a small segment of the the original.

Somehow, though, I got a video file that was more than 10 times larger than the original!! WTF? My original video was 525MB, 17 mins 12 secs long. The new one is only 6 minutes long and 8.23GB in size! What’s going on?? :eek:

Here’s the details: I tried using that popular free thing, VirtualDub. I followed the instructions in the help, selected a segment at the beginning, then deleted it, then selected a segment at the end of the video and deleted that too. So I ended up with just a small segment in the middle. And then I did File > Save As AVI. And I got the above result =\

Also, the new video file is messed up: it plays at significantly slower speed. So it’s not even real-time anymore, it’s slow-mo.

So can anyone help me with these problems plz? This should be a really simple thing to do, why am I having issues? :frowning: It’s also a bit urgent as I will be doing a presentation soon and need to sort this stuff out by then
Thanks

2

I think you’ll need to install and select a DivX or Xvid codec first. Otherwise it uses an uncompressed AVI format.

3

Uncompressed AVIs are just a stream of still images IIRC, I personally use the open source xvid codec to encode to mpeg4.

4

Oh, so VirtualDub saves them uncompressed? So how would I use this (or any other) codec together with VD to end up with a compressed avi? Should I just do what I have been doing with VirtualDub and then go back and compress the huge resulting avi down to slim size? I don’t know how this xvid thing works at all yet (gonna explore the website right now), so I’m not sure what approach you’re suggesting.

5

Xvid is a codec that you need to install. This will be “plugged” into Windows. Now you can use any video software, and save a file as AVI. You should be able to choose Xvid as codec, and make some additional changes to the settings if required.