Any suggestions for compressing a giant Quicktime file?

[onealc]

Hi folks,
Can anyone suggest the best way to compress a giant Quicktime file? I want to put it onto a blank DVD or CD. Right now, it's 11gigs in size. It's an old home movie I copied from VHS into Quicktime. I guess I should have originally saved it at a lower quality, but...

Anyway, anyone have any tips on the best way to shrink the file size now, or can it even be shrunk enough to fit onto a blank DVD if the original is almost 11 gigabytes in size.

Thanks for any tips.

[Rower_CPU]

How do you intend to use it? If you just want a simple data backup to DVD then a high quality MPEG4 setting should do just fine.

If it's going on the web you'll need to consider lots of other things (bandwidth, diskspace, etc).

[pianojoe]

If it's not longer than 2 hrs, just drop it into iDVD and burn it.

[onealc]

Yeh, I basically just want to back it up - pretty much take it off my hard drive and save it onto a DVD, but keeping it as high quality as possible. Since it's 11gigs, it takes up a pretty big chunk of my hard drive, so being able to put it off elsewhere would be cool - I just hate to degrade the quality any.

Good tips by the way.

THANKS
:)

[DVDSP]

Originally posted by onealc
Since it's 11gigs, it takes up a pretty big chunk of my hard drive, so being able to put it off elsewhere would be cool - I just hate to degrade the quality any.


As mentioned by pianojoe MPEG-2 can drop that size down pretty well, depending on what codec it is using already. Considering the VHS source I wouldn't worry too much about degrading the quality. Do you have QT Pro or iDVD? I don't remember if QT Pro comes with the MPEG-2 codec anymore, but you can see the estimated final output size before you start your render. I just checked a 17 MB file and after MPEG-2 it will be just 2.5 MB. I realize this is significantly smaller than the file you are dealing with but it gives you an idea...

[encro]

Split it into 3 Parts and burn each part to its own DVD.

You can always join it back together later.