www.ukbutterflies.co.uk

Hi folks,

Slightly off-topic, but I believe this is the right forum.

I'm currently doing some work for Butterfly Conservation that will require me to edit digital video (AVI, MPEG formats). I was wondering what software visitors would recommend. I'm particularly interested in:

a) Being able to convert these formats to RealPlayer format.

b) Reducing the video image size.

c) Creating extracts of the video.

Thanks in advance for any responses.

Cheers,

- Pete

Thought I'd better post what I've discovered.

First off, one of my sons pointed out that Windows (which is the platform I use) comes with a "Windows Movie Maker" program that does pretty much everything I need. How embarassing is that - especially since I work in IT

In terms of converting to Real Player format, there's free software available called "Helix Producer", available from https://helix-producer.helixcommunity.org/. If you want to stream video over the web using Real Player, then this is just the ticket.

And thanks to Colin Baker for pointing out Pinnacle Studio (see http://www.pinnaclesys.com) which I'd seriously consider should I ever "get serious" about taking video.

Cheers,

- Pete

Hi Pete - i do some video editing and use adobe premiere. basically its like photoshop but for video. So its certainly something to consider but takes a long time (for me anyway) to get to grips with it.

As for real player......

The real player is scum of the earth software. Sorry to put it this way but i really hate it - ever since in about 1999 or 2000 the free version of real player came with spyware - i vowed never to use it again.

A really good video codec is DivX or Xvid. Xvid is better as its open source. They are also mpeg 4 video and use mp3 as the audio so file sizes are really small.

There are many guides to encoding in

http://www.doom9.org/

Hope this is of some help

Cheers, Mark


Love the new forum by the way

Thanks Mark - and welcome to the forum!

The recommendation to use RealPlayer actually came from Butterfly Conservation's hosting company (I'm also doing some work for BC which requires the use of streamed video, and I asked them the question). Therefore ... I'm concerned

The "real" requirements are:

- To be able to stream video over the web efficiently (rather than having to download the entire video)
- To ensure that recipients can use free software to play the streamed video
- To support all of the common platforms (PC, Mac) and operating systems
- That it's simple

I understand that there are many many formats and codecs, which is why I went with the recommendation. And I hope Real Inc. no longer ships a free spyware app

I'd appreciate any specific recommendations you might have.

Cheers

- Pete

Im sure that real player is fine now. But i do remember that the free version released back then was really bad...

There is windows wmv format that can be streamed easily but im not sure how mac computers would handle this. But at a guess it would probably be fine. There is also the mac .mov format.

I do know that some sites use macromedia flash to stream video but am not sure which formats it can handle.

I don't know which file format is most common for streaming but i think that the windows one tops the list followed by real player then the mac one. I base this only on my experiences of web surfing so i could be completely wrong.

I have one butterfly vid on my site which i did in divx format at a resolution of 320 by 256. Its 3min 12 seconds long and with sound is about 19Mb. I have found that if there is alot of foliage, grass etc. then there is that much information to encode, file sizes tend to be quite large in order to produce a decent video.

Cheers, mark

OSX (mac's OS) streams wmv fine as long as you have the addon installed.

It also plays just about anything else, however I also refuse to install any Real applications for the same reasons outlined by Mark, it really used to mess up Windows systems. Of course you wouldnt have this problem with a mac but still I wont install it!

Mpeg4 is my favourite format, and xvid (hacked version of Mpeg4).

Mov files are nice, and very stable. Of course can be streamed to windows PCs just as easily to Macs. mpeg4 is usually transported inside an .mov file.