Help with converting digital camera videos

jjack

Guest

I recently purchased a Canon A540 digital camera, which is capable of shooting video. I am happy with the video quality (640x480, 30fps), however the .AVI files uses M-JPEG, which results in huge files (1 min is about 120 MB, I can only fit ~17 min of video on my 2GB SD card).

So, I want to convert my videos, I would like: Decent compression, quality, and support (i.e. I want to be able to send it to someone and expect that they can probably play it with downloading an obscure codec/player).

I tried using VirtualDub, but it doesn’t seem to work so well with M-JPEG (my conversion to Divx produces no video, only audio). So I have been using Super (http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html) and trying out TMPGEnc Xpress.

I was hoping for suggestions on which format to convert to (Divx, Xvid, MPEG, WMV...) and some settings.

I have found that around 800-1000 kbps of Divx or Xvid produces reasonable results at 7-10 MB for 1 min (about 12-17x smaller than the original file).

I also noticed that converters seem to want to use 29.97 fps, I don’t know if there is a good reason for this, or if I should be concerned going from 30fps to 29.97 fps (a synch error or quality loss or something).

Also, the camera records mono-PCM audio at 88kbps and 11025Hz (I think), which I have been compressing to mono-MP3 at 64kps which seems to sound fine.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated