Question / Help Oh My Gosh Video Sizes =P

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gamerprox

Member
So ok, I save a recording of my stream on my hard drive, in flv format. I easily convert it to an mp4, no loss in quality, maybe less file space.

Every hour of video takes about 1.2 gig file size. Thats fine, I accept that.

I take this hour long video, slap it on Windows Movie Maker 12, edit out about, 4 minutes worth of footage.Then Save it as the same mp4 it was before. And it triples the file size to about an 3.9. I drop the bit rate, the quality goes to unwatchable.

Normally file size aint that big of a deal, but im doing this streaming thing every night, and wow, thats gotta eat alot of space fast. I like to save my full playthroughs, edit out all the times I went afk, or....coughexessivedeathscough... so its a simple smooth video of the whole experience.

I guess a part of me thought, if I had a gig file, and edited it, it would still be a gig or less.
 
dodgepong

dodgepong

Administrator
Community Helper
A back-of-the-napkin calculation tells me that if an hour of video is 1.2gigs, then you're probably streaming/recording around 2600kbps. This is compressed video, and it already won't look perfect, but it's good enough. When you import it into an editor and then save it again, you're re-encoding it. You already encoded it once in a lossy, low-bit rate format, and then you want to do it again, which is why the video doesn't look good when you re-render it out with a low bit rate. In order to maintain the same quality that the original had, it actually needs to encode at high bit rate just to reduce the amount that the re-encode degrades quality. So maybe it encodes at around 10000kbps, which should keep the quality reduction to a minimum. However, since the bit rate (amount of data put into each second of video) is almost quadrupling, then the file size will quadruple as well.
 
G

gamerprox

Member
Wow....you made that sound like perfect sense, and have managed to free my mind with one simple paragraph. Video encoding/editing are things im just now getting into.

If you could only edit flv files, I would never have to use movie maker. Im streaming at 1920x1080p down scaling to 1280x720p on obs, with a max bitrate of 2700 and a quality of 8. Nice job on the napkin =)

So, my internet speed wont allow me to go any faster, my videos look decent tho, alot better than some of the other channels I have seen, you can at least watch my video with nothing blurry at full screen, which is what I wanted, may not be 1080p crystal sharp, but good enough to be enjoyable. So, I see lots of hard drives in my future, Thank you for clearing up 2 weeks of headaches.
 
G

gamerprox

Member
flv's are naturally smaller right? Is there any way to take an mp4 file, do my editing to it, and save it as an .flv? Movie Maker wont allow this, how do you guys handle these massive file sizes?
 
dodgepong

dodgepong

Administrator
Community Helper
FLV files aren't really much smaller than MP4. In fact, they are both containers for h264/AVC video and AAC audio, and the only difference really is metadata. So they will actually be very close in size, with FLV only being a little bit smaller.

People handle massive files by getting big hard drives. Personally I have a terabyte hard drive just dedicated to storing stream recordings.
 
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