Check this out - Oly5050 VIDEO!

[Dee]

There's no program anywhere that can convert the Quicktime clips to WMV?

Ideally I'd like to convert these files and combine them all into a longer clip. Not for any other purpose than our own enjoyment at having clips from a trip.

 

[Genesis]

Premiere will do it. The packaging and info on the web implies (but does not clearly state) that it can.

I'm not about to spend $700 to find out though!

 

[Dee]

Genesis once bubbled...
I'm not about to spend $700 to find out though!

I don't think so!

 

[SimonJ]

Microsoft have just announced that they are going to open up their standards for video to an external body.....in theory this means that people will be able to start creating tools and converters for WMV.

http://news.com.com/2100-1023_3-5073141.html?tag=cd_mh

Simon

 

[davehicks]

Dee once bubbled...
Dave...how did you convert your movie clip to WMV? My Oly camera make Quicktime movies but I prefer to view them as WMV.

I just loaded the AVI into the Windows Movie Maker program that comes with Windows XP. I added some titles, and output it as a WMV file.

There are 1001 other Free & Shareware apps that can do conversions as well. (on a PC)

This site is a great resource for How To and Tools info.
http://www.dvdrhelp.com/

Enjoy,
Dave

 

[Genesis]

The quality loss in doing that (going into Movie Maker) is EXTREME.

Further, the WMV that it makes comes up double-sized (at least it does when I try it) with no way to tell it not to do that... you can resize down, but originally at least its REAL ugly.

 

[Dee]

I have XP on my laptop. I'll have to try that.

I'm not surprised to hear there's a loss in quality, it just depends on how bad it is. These clips are not really for sharing, just for ourselves to remember things.

 

[sailor025]

It's made for burning video to disc. I've made digital movies from home vhs tapes. I don't know if it will work with these files but one day I'll try it and let you know.

Rodney

 

[Genesis]

The originals are marginal to start with - converted to WMVs they are REAL bad. They do take up a lot less space though! One of mine shrunk from 4.7mb to something like 1.4!

 

[davehicks]

Genesis once bubbled...
The quality loss in doing that (going into Movie Maker) is EXTREME.

Further, the WMV that it makes comes up double-sized (at least it does when I try it) with no way to tell it not to do that... you can resize down, but originally at least its REAL ugly.

I think you are pretty far off base, at least in this case. The crappy 320x200 video taken by most small digi-cams is not great to begin with. In the case of this video I posted I started with a 6 MB file, and deliberately reduced the bit rate of if the video so it would fit in less than 1.5 MB. (The amount of space left on my Earthlink Website) Frankly, I can't tell the difference between the two. When I did a straight conversion at equivalent bit rates, the file shrank to about 4 MB.

As for WMV itself, it supports higher quality video than other formats out there. Have you seen the new T2 DVD that comes with a WMV9 copy of the movie on the Extras Disk? It's encoded at much greater resolution than HDTV. (Which is itself greater than the DVD standard.)

Conversions are really tricky to do well in any case. I've done some TV video captures in the past and experimented with WMV, MPEG, DivX and other encodings. The number of variables that you can tweak in all of these formats is huge, and make a big difference in the result. The freeby Movie Maker does a decent job given it's limited functionality.

Dave