Saving a avi at a good file size to fit on a HD

Paulito wrote on 1/15/2011, 1:41 AM
I did a project that is an 1 hour and 20 minutes. Last night I tried to render it as a avi, then later it would not finish, telling me my hd was out of space. I thought "Okay I will free up lots of space. I have 53.7 GB of free space. The render settings said my estimated file size under the Default Template [uncompressed] is 853 MB. I went to go eat dinner, and I noticed after a half hour of rendering the estimated time of finishing would not stop, it said 12 hours straight, and would not stop there. It acts as if this were a 5 hour movie when it is not, again it is only an 80 minutes. The video I'm editing is a avi file I downloaded, and is a size of 720 x 480, which is the standard size I wish to save it as.

Does this have to do with the right template? Am I missing something under preferences? The other head scratcher of this is that through the fall I dl 4 hour long episodes of a show to burn on disc. When I rendered each of them to avi files I had NO space issue at all, and that time I had the same amount of free space. And each time I rendered those episodes it took up to 6 hours each which I knew was a standard amount of time, and they came out great. One night I while I slept it rendered an ep through teh 6 hours, and the next night I'd do the same for the next ep.

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 1/15/2011, 3:42 AM
AVI Uncompressed is going to be many, many GBs. What you're after is XVID, which is not "avi". AVI is just a container, and can hold in it many different kinds of codecs, some create small filesizes, some are huge. So what you need is to install the XVID encoder for Windows, then select AVI from the Render As screen, then click CUSTOM, then set the right parameters in the video tab after you hit Custom, and then you must select the XVID encoder from the list of encoders in that dialog.
jetdv wrote on 1/15/2011, 7:27 AM
DV-AVI is much smaller than uncompressed. It will be about 13 Gig per hour.

With respect to Eugenia, I don't know why anyone would render to XVid or DivX unless it was the final output as they are not good for editing in the future. Personally, I've never seen a reason to use either of those codecs.
Eugenia wrote on 1/15/2011, 6:12 PM
Yes, I'm assuming that he/she wants to export in a delivery format. If he/she just wants to save it losslessly (*if* the original was DV), then DV-AVI is best.