I've got some videos I shot with my camera in MTS format. The files are very large (almost 2GB for one 21 minute video) and I'd like to convert them to reduce the file size without sacrificing their quality too much. Can anyone recommend some free software to do the job? Advice on target formats/settings would be much appreciated too. Thanks.
Handbrake. Use the MKV format. I'd try a constant quality of 18 to start with. If toouch quality is lost work your way down (lower number is higher quality).
Avidemux is nice and lets you edit the video at the same time if you wish, as well as basic transcoding.
Thanks very much for your help. I didn't even think of handbrake, I think I just assumed it wouldn't be free. I'm doing a video now with constant quality set to 18 as you suggested so I'll see what it comes out like and go from there I'll bear that in mind too, thanks
Handbrake is really good. I use a CQ of 15 when converting my blu rays. I've found that the darker a film is (lots of night scenes etc) the lower CQ is needed to maintain quality. I hate night scenes with banding across the skyline lol For example i can rip Cars at CQ20 and it looks pretty much bang on. But to do the same with Frozen which has more dark scenes I needed to use CQ15. To save messing about I just use CQ15 for everything now. If you're happy with the quality but not the file size, retry it but change the encoding speed from very fast to normal or slow. It will encode a lot slower but tends to reduce file size. Personally I go for fast or very fast mostly because I'm impatient
Awesome, thanks for the advice. I'll experiment with it some more soon for sure. The videos I was working with last night were ones I'd filmed on my camera during a trial flight with my dad for his 60th. Flying conditions weren't ideal, there was a lot of turbulence so the video was quite jumpy, but otherwise came out better than I'd expected. Handbrake cut the sizes of the files roughly in half without any obvious drop in quality. I had about five or six videos so I stitched them together using Windows Movie Maker and then to save it that encoded it all again. The resulting video was fine for YouTube but I'm sure there must be better ways to edit/combine videos than that.
Avidemux is pretty much what you want then. It's ideal for cutting, cropping and stitching videos from any source. Then you can encode the edits directly in much the same way Handbrake does. It takes a little bit of mastering but it's not that complicated and it's a really good piece of software.
