back Exporting video

When you have finished editing your video, you will want to export it out from the editing software and onto a DVD or perhaps another hard drive. When you export your project you need to choose export settings. These settings will determine the image quality and image size of your video.  Most software programs have presets, which determine these settings based on your requirements.

What is a CODEC?
When you export a video, the software will use a CODEC. CODEC stands for Compression/Decompression. A CODEC makes the data or video information smaller (compression) so that the computer can deal it with more easily, and then makes it larger again (decompression) for exporting to the particular video format.

Common video codecs are:
DV – broadcast quality video with no compression loss. Fixed data rate of
3.6 mb/sec.  Full screen DV PAL is 768 x 576 pixels.

MPEG2 – codec used for creating DVDs.  Same quality with the data rate of DV, although still difficult to edit with and generally unsupported by most editing software.

MJPEG - higher compression, which means a smaller, file size but less quality.
640x480 is considered to be full screen capture.

MPEG1 -a good choice for creating multimedia or web based video. Unlike MJPEG, MPEG-1 is designed to pack a large amount of good quality video into a small file.

The highest quality export for a video project is DV PAL .

You would use this preset if you want to make a full broadcast quality video to be played on TV or DVD.
 
The settings for this are:

Compressor: DV PAL
           
Image size: 720 x 576 pixels            Image quality: Best
Frames: 25 fps (frames per second)
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 4:3 (1: 1.067)
Common multimedia formats
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QuickTime (.mov)
This is the standard video format for video on Apple MAC computers.  QuickTime player comes free with your MAC computer or the latest version can be downloaded for PC or MAC from:  http://www.apple.com/quicktime

AVI -Audio Video Interleave (.avi)
Created by Microsoft, AVI used to be the standard video format on Windows computers.  Now it has been taken over by WMV format.  Although it is still the export option for some PC-based video software.

Windows Media Video (.wmv)
WMV is the current standard video format for most PC-based editing programs such as Premiere and Moviemaker.  Windows Media Player comes free with your PC computer or the latest version can be downloaded for PC or MAC from:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia

The MPEG Format
The MPEG (Moving Pictures Expert Group) format is the most popular format on the Internet. It is cross-platform, and supported by all the most popular web browsers.Videos stored in the MPEG format have the extension .mpg or .mpeg.

The RealVideo Format
The RealVideo format was developed for the Internet by Real Media.
The format allows streaming of video (on-line video, Internet TV) with low bandwidths. Because of the low bandwidth priority, quality is often reduced.
Videos stored in the RealVideo format have the extension .rm or .ram.