CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

I can't seem to get a video from my digital camera to upload, and I want a video editing program to mess around with it. Any ideas? None of the media players can play it, and it's format is .avi.

Wait... You can't upload it, but it's format is AVI and none of the media players can play it.

That's very confusing. Let's break this down:

1. Can you copy the file from your camera to your computer?
2. What kind of camera do you have (media type, etc).
3. What video program came with the camera?
4. What other video programs have you tried?
5. What encoding scheme does it use? AVI is just an envelope - you can put encode in many different formats using AVI.

That might make it easier for us to help you.

Isn't AVI from a digital camera essentially uncompressed video? Presuming you have the right connectors (Firewire is a popular one) or a converter box it should work.

Do you have enough filespace (uncompressed is massive)

Hmm... Maybe a bit of information about container formats is in vogue today...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_format
About AVI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVI


Find out what codec was used to compress the video, and we can help figure out what program to use to view it.

AnimeHeretic wrote:Isn't AVI from a digital camera essentially uncompressed video? Presuming you have the right connectors (Firewire is a popular one) or a converter box it should work.

Do you have enough filespace (uncompressed is massive)

I think its in its own compressed state. When I make short videos with my digital camera, I can put them on my computer. They aren't too large in size.

I had a camera that pulled in really high un-compressed dv. But I had an HD recorder on the box, so it was able to capture insane ammounts of info - waste lots of drive space, too, lol.

Ah...I thought it couldn't upload; it simply took a long time. However, no video players can play it, but once it is uploaded it can be seen.

I very much doubt it is uncompressed - at 720x576, I had about 1GB/minute for uncompressed AVI files I've used.

Quicktime usually has a larger selection of playable codecs. Or you could try Quicktime Alternative (my preference).

Try opening it in Windows Movie Maker 2.1, if you have it.

What do you mean 'it can be seen'?

Use Windows Movie Maker if you want something easy to work with. That's what I'm editting my movie with right now.
You just select the "Capture Video from Device" option, record it, edit, and select "Make Movie" and it will give you a bunch of options for size, quality, ect.

PM if you need any help. Because recently I've tried out quiet a few different editting programs.

It gives it an AVI extension, though? You should be able to look at the properties and figure out what compression codec it's using.

Mithrandir wrote:Hmm... Maybe a bit of information about container formats is in vogue today...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_format
About AVI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVI

Interesting they called it Obsolete, though I suppose with HD it could be.

A lot of people I knew preferred to use AVI over mpeg to edit because of the GOP frames in mpeg meant the order they were stored in were not always the order they played. I would usually take AVI, edit it and then convert the final product to the needed format but then again this was back in 2003-2004. The main drawback was space, as AVI took 200mb per minute

I certainly disagree with AVI being called 'obselete'.

Unless I can avoid it, I always edit the video in DV AVI format (usual MPEG compressed files are not as good to work with). And I output it as 2.1Mbit/s WMV 720x576 unless I have specific reason not to.

I remember I used to work with WMM 2 but the problem I had was you couldn't edit mpeg2 or divx, so I couldn't make my cheap knockoffs of Kung Pow or the like so I used Sony's Movie Studio which wasn't bad for $99. Of course my copy is long obsolete and it couldn't work with divx/mpeg4 codecs. It would be nice to have access to that