Hi All,

I made a 14 minute piece full of video, 200 still-photos, transitions and effects. I'm trying to send it to my father via email for his birthday. I've saved it in a bunch of formats. The smallest one is 120Megabytes. America online's email only allows an email attachment upto 16MB. Creating a Zip file doesn't come close.

...How can I get it to him?

...or 1. Is there an email service that allows large attachments?
2. What do I need to do to upload it to a free public website?
(AVI format is 1 Gigabyte, while VCD is 130MB, ....not much difference between the two)

If I save it on CD rom, it won't get there in time

Thanks for your input,
Jason

You need to use a codec with a high compression rate such as MPEG4. There's two popular "non-microsoft" MPEG4 codecs available in the form of DivX and Xvid. These are great codecs which, combined with low resolutions, will get your video down to 16MB file size. I use VirtualDub to encode using these codecs; you can find a guide to VirtualDub on my site and a a google search will get you the codecs themselves.

Although these codecs work wonders, the end user will have to download and install them if they don't already have them. One idea is to Zip up the videos with the ffdshow filters which will allow playback, but it involves the end user actually doing something

Another alternative is to encode to WMV. You can do this with Windows Media Encoder (a free download from the MS site). If you encode using WMV8, the video will be playable on just about any windows box out there. In an ideal world, I'd use Xvid, but alas not everyone had the necesary codecs, so I tend to use WMV for downloadaable clips.

Theres a guide to windows media encoder on my website.

__________________

| video editing guides | our videos |
| wedding guides | website hosting |

Marc, I think I downloaded Virtual Dub a few days ago, but have yet to install it. I'm gonna get into that later tonight. I've read so many of your guides in the last few days that I'm not sure if I read the one on VirtualDub, but I probably did somewhat because I downloaded. Or did I?

Anyway, WMV was the first format that I saved it in. I wasn't satisfied with the quality. I saved the first 30 seconds and that was already 2MB, so I doubt 15 minutes will be under 16MB. I suppose my solution is to cut it in half and send the two in WMV. After getting a taste of low quality, then he can receive a cdrom in the mail with the good version.

But as to my other question, is there a guide out there that instructs on how to put a video on a webpage? I'm sure I can figure it out on my own, but I get so many results in my "internet searches" that I need some guidance.

P.S. Marc, I have those still-frame clips on my computer. Should I send them to you in WMV or MPEG or what? MB limit? ttylater

Take a look at the HTML code of this page: http://www.marcpeters.co.uk/example-videos.html for an idea of how to incorporate video on webpages.

__________________

| video editing guides | our videos |
| wedding guides | website hosting |

WMV is fine, don't worry too much about the file size as long as it's less than 5MB

__________________

| video editing guides | our videos |
| wedding guides | website hosting |