I thought I'd share information on my little video conversion project, in case Geri, or other folks here find it useful:
I first tried Microsoft Movie Maker, as suggested by Ron Wrucke at Compuserve's Photo Forum. Yes, to my surprise I had it. I appears to be a standard Windows XP Accessory. It was simple and fast. And my 54MB AVI file was reduced to 164KB However, I wasn't sure if MSWMM was a common format, and I wanted Non-Windows users, or users with older Windows systems to be able to play the clip, too.
Kathleen Tinkel at http://www.desktoppublishingforum.com/ suggested QuickTime as a fairly universal format. OK, QuickTimePro version is $29 - it is also fairly simple and fast - although my personal feeling is I don't really like the way the user interface looks.
My resulting QuickTime MOV file is 25MEG. Still too big.
And then I realize neither of the two web hosts I use support streaming video. Okie-Dokie, more research. I came up with http://videodesk.net/ as a streaming video host. But it wants WMV files, so I still need need to convert.
Instead of using VideoDesk's converter (it probably would have worked just fine), I kept Googling. I found http://www.smartsoftvideo.com/ Pro version on sale for $29. I like the interface too. Simple and intuitive. I went back to the original AVI file and used SmartSoftVideo to convert in to WMV - Playing with different compression levels, I came up with a fair balance of quality and size at - 4.8 MB . FYI: Videodesk is free for up to 5MB of storage and 100MB of bandwidth usage. My file size was no problem, but the account exceeded the bandwidth usage after a couple of days and I upgraded to a paid account.
Here's a link to the final result if anyone is curious.
http://www.bob-taylor.com/highlandpark-video.htm
It's a copy of an ABC Eyewitness News segment about Highland Park, California. The ABC manager gave me permission for personal use. This is personal use, right? I just sharing it with my NELA Live friends.
ABC gave me a VHS tape. I played the tape on an old VHS player and videoed it using the movie mode on my Canon Pro 1 camera. Which is how I ended up with the AVI file.
Why I bothered in the first place: Kelley Van Patter is a long time client, Bob Taylor (talking about restaurants and art galleries) is my business partner. Edem Elish, the artist with a studio in his basement is my next door neighbor.
