Quote:
Originally Posted by SEE
...Fortunately, I kept WIN XP on a partition and downloaded the 'add-ons' for Windows Movie Maker...
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In that case, if you're using an older version of WMM, when it comes time to export your video, see if you can find a way to adjust the bit-rate/data-rate and key-frame distance, rather than just using one of the built-in pre-sets. If you can get the key-frame distance to 300 and the bit-rate up to 20Mbps, your image won't be as degraded when it's compressed down to it's final form and will look about as good as it can when uploaded for viewing on the net. It will mean though you end up with a larger file size than you'd get using a lower data-rate and more compression, something in the order of 100MB per minute (so, about 1GB per 10 mins), but it's probably worth it to have the image still looking alright when played full-screen. It's up to you though to decide how you want to balance final file size with final image quality.
I should point out too that those figures are based on exporting your video as a H.264 MP4 file. Again, I don't know what you've got installed and what your options are, but you really want to be exporting your final video as a H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video. H.264 is currently the best of the readily available and widely used video compression options. It will give you a better looking picture for a smaller file size than any of the other free options around. So what you're looking for in WMM is an option to export your final video as an MPEG-4 (.mp4) file, using H.264 compression. To be honest, I've been using H.264 compression for so long I can't remember if I had to actually download it and install it at some point or if it was included with Windows 7 or some other software I've installed, but it's definitely worth looking into and making use of it, even if you have to export your video out of WMM as an uncompressed (and ridiculously large) file and then convert it to an MP4 file using VirtualDub or some other (free) stand-alone video conversion program.
Hope that all makes sense. Good luck with it in any case.