Question about shooting video with Canon T2i

[Lazy Photographer]

Well, it's not really about shooting video as much as it is about resizing.

I shot my first video a couple of days back on my T2i. I think it was about 4 minutes or something. I knew it was going to be a large file, but wasn't expecting 1.7 GIGS!

No problem, I thought: I'll just reduce it in size. I have Adobe Premiere Pro, which is rumoured to handle such a task. I figured the quickest way would be to google the answer. Problem is, for the life of me I was not able to find a simple answer to how to resize a video.

Anyway, long story longer, I'm wondering how it can be that youtube is filled with millions of terabytes of video uploaded by millions of users, but I can't find any way to simply resize my little video. Anyone got any ideas?

 

[dylanstraub]

What type of file did you get from the camera? There are programs out there to change the file format from say a .AVI file to an XVID which would also change the size of the file. Your best course of action is 1: Check out You Tube for any restrictions on the file types you can upload 2: Check out this web site AfterDawn.com for different programs available to convert to a different format. They have very active video forums and chances are they could give you some help if you need it.

 

[MohaimenK]

A trick would be to upload the video to youtube then use Orbit Downloader Grab ++ to download it right back from youtube which will already be compressed and a much smaller file size

 

[Lazy Photographer]

Thanks Dylan. It's in Quicktime. I'll check out that site like you suggested.

Thanks Moh. I tried that but it'll take like 368 hours to upload that file size. It took over an hour just to get started.

 

[MohaimenK]

Thanks Dylan. It's in Quicktime. I'll check out that site like you suggested.

Thanks Moh. I tried that but it'll take like 368 hours to upload that file size. It took over an hour just to get started.

HOLLY CRAP!!! That's strange. What internet speed are you using? At 25mbps it usually takes me a few mins to upload a 1gb file...When you open with Adobe premier doesn't it give you a "compression" option? I haven't done video work in a while but hope you figure it out. Good luck

 

[Lazy Photographer]

I've never uploaded anything to youtube before so I had no idea what to expect. Maybe it was just busy? I'm running a high speed internet connection. Thanks.

 

[Blake.Oney]

You have to use a video compression software. I would recommend editing the original files with premiere, save, and compress. Just google video compression softwares. If you're on a pc Windows Movie Maker actually has some of the best stock compression of any other program not made for it. You could edit in Premiere, open in MM, and export as whatever format you'd like.

 

[Lazy Photographer]

Thanks. I downloaded Windows Movie Maker and it worked like a charm. My 1.7 gig movie is now 234 megs. I'm going to post it on my blog if anyone's interested in seeing the video quality of a t2i, and me playing a short song on guitar. Don't expect much, I'm not very good.

 

[DerekSalem]

I'd stay as far from Windows Movie Maker as you can. Utter trash, that program.

Quick and easy file transcoding or converting? Handbrake. Aside from large lists of videos that I transcode at once (basically meaning shrinking it down or changing it to another file/container type) Handbrake does a fantastic job of doing it all. Not sure why nobody's mentioned it before lol but I can slim a 4Gb video file down to around 100Mb or less without much noise or video compression problems.


^^ Took that with a T2i. Started out as a file just over 320Mb. After transcoding it was around 19Mb.

Basically, open up the file in Handbrake (you can find it via Google pretty easily) by hitting "Source" then Video File. It'll probably take a few seconds to load it up but then just pick "Normal" profile under Regular and it'll set everything else up for you. It takes awhile to transcode HD videos (depending on your CPU speed and whatnot) but it's better than uploading 3Gb+ files to YouTube.

As for the upload speed...that's normal. I have a 16/4 connection (pretty quick) and uploading HD videos takes *quite* awhile. That's another reason to shrink down the file size as much as possible before uploading.

 

[Blake.Oney]

I agree WMM is a trash editing program, but it's compression isn't bad. I use sorenson squeeze for compression, but that was a quick and free solution.

 

[Lazy Photographer]

I'll give handbrake a try too. Nice ride, btw. Reminds me of the good ol' days.

 

[DerekSalem]

I'll give handbrake a try too. Nice ride, btw. Reminds me of the good ol' days.

Handbrake's definitely the best all-around conversion/transcoding application on the internet (free ones, anyway). I also use it to encode DVDs to file. Using h.264 (which it normally uses) you can encode a movie down to around a 300Mb file with virtually no visual quality hit at all. It's amazing.


As for the ride...I just sold it a few weeks ago I ship out in just over a week so got rid of it now instead of it sitting around losing value for the next few years. It was *really* hard watching it roll down the street with someone else riding it.