Hi all,

I've recently become aware that some video professionals I know are somehow using Adobe Premiere in conjunction with Windows Media Encoder 9 to create very high quality Avi files that appear almost as good as the original uncompressed Avi files. However they are way way smaller in size (similar to a Wmv file), and are small enough for internet distribution. I've asked for details but they tell me it is proprietary information and they only gave me a few hints. I was hoping that some of you advanced video editors may have stumbled on, or can figure out this technique.

Here is an example of some of the video that was output using this method:

http://wx5tvs.com/chasephotos/2004/2...ado2debris.avi

Note that this is a 15.4 Mb size file; however since this is a fairly long clip the original uncompressed would have to be hundreds of Megabytes in size.

Does anyone have any ideas here? :

In my humble opinion, there's nothing particularly special about they way they've encoded the video. To be honest, 16MB for 1m45s ain't that great. Anyhows, here are the particulars for the video:

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...wmv3 is just the FourCC name for the Windows Media 9 codec. Additionally, you'll notice that there's no great movement in the scene which means the quality will be better than scenes of high actitvity for any given bitrate. It's a real shame that they call it "proprietary information". Since when did video encoders get all secretative? LOL.

Anyway, as I said, I don't think they've done anything spectacular as the video bitrate is high and the file size similary so. Additionally, extrapolating from the file size to video length ratio, a full movie would be bewteen 650-700MB. Given that most MPEG4 encoded videos are roughly this size with equivalent quality, again I don't feel they've re-invented the wheel.

I could be wrong, but I really don't think this is a major breakthrough

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Very interesting. Thanks for the analysis. I'll take a deeper look at what you are saying and perhaps do a few tests.

Question: I wonder though, how do they take an Avi and run it through Windows Media Encoder (or export it in Premiere), compressing it with Windows Media Encoder, but outputting it as an AVI file and not a WMV? I didn't think Media Encoder had that option. Is this done by using the Windows Media 9 VCM encoder?
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...odecs/vcm.aspx

Bill

Remember that the AVI extension is just a container for the encoded video. You don't have to use the WMV extension (but WME complains about it). It also complains about uncompressed audio, so it's doubtfull they used WME... unless they hacked it. Which is doubtful. Much easier to use something like VirtualDub and the WM9 codec.

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