i want to cut the video down by taking a little off the beginning and a little off the end to make the video smaller so i can email it to a friend. right now the vid is from my sony dcr-sr100 and is in the mpg format that is pulled directly off my camcorder. i have downloaded womble, but i can't figure out how to do this. the vid is currently 44MB is only about 20sec's long. can someone walk me through this?

If you're using XP, you can do this with Windows Movie Maker. Just import your video in, and then you can render it either by file type or file size. A 20 second video could easily be compressed down to less than 5MB. Don't go too low though, the quality will start to suffer drastically.

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I have recently purchased the Sony sr-100 also...with the goal of uploading clips to a web page. The raw files off the camcorder are huge, as Holty described. I have installed womble, I have XP with windows movie maker, and have even downloaded A-One video converter...all in an attempt to convert these huge MPEG-2 files to smaller files...preferably wmv or mpg....without losing too much quality. When I try to import the MPEG-2 file into movie maker per thirtyframes suggestion, I get an error about "interface has too many methods to fire events from".

Anyone have any other suggestions?

By it's nature video creates what some people consider large files if you want good quality video however the files become too large for the average person to download so video quality suffers and you compress the video in order to get a reasonable size.

Windows Movie Maker does not normally import MPEG-2 files. Some people claim it will which is a claim I have never been able to verify several times on several systems over several years. "The MPEG2 format has several codecs that are not supported by Windows Movie Maker. Even if you have downloaded and installed these codecs on your computer, files in the MPEG2 format may not work in Windows Movie Maker or may cause other problems. Converting the MPEG2 format to another compatible format may work for most MPEG2 files." http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308464


"8.2 Can Windows Media Encoder 9 Series convert MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 files?
Yes. But in order to convert MPEG-2 files, you must have a Microsoft DirectShow® decode filter installed on your computer. The DirectShow decode filter is available from third-party software vendors. You can test the source file by playing it using Windows Media Player 9 Series. If the video does not appear correctly, then the file will not be encoded correctly" http://www.microsoft.com/windows/wi...er/faq.aspx#8_2 The Windows Media Encoder 9 Series will import MPEG2 and allow you to encode to .WMV it can be downloaded at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/wi...er/default.mspx

According to the spec sheet Womble MVW and MVW-DVD will import MPEG-2 and output MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. You might try outputting at MPEG-1 for smaller video files. http://www.womble.com/products/Feature.htm




Rich

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