Hello, everyone and welcome to this free video tutorial about video file formats. My name is Lorraine Grula with VideoProductionTips.com. If you see a video file with .MOV at the end of it this stands for a QuickTime movie which is an Apple product. Apple QuickTime is very common these days on PCs so you don’t need to worry about QuickTime movies not being compatible with PC, they will be.
QuickTime is considered very good format by a lot of people who are in the video because it gives you an excellent looking file. However, QuickTime movies are pretty large. They are not small files and that’s the reason why they look so good. So people who have the criteria of smallness don’t necessarily like QuickTime but people who have the criteria of quality do like QuickTime and it is very compatible with most PCs so you don’t have to worry about that, that’s not the issue.
Now real video is also quite common and it is on most computers when you buy them. The player for real video just like with the music, real audio. Now a lot of video files don’t particularly like real video because it tends to be a little bit unstable and so forth but it is very common. All right, now let’s talked about all the MPEG formats and there are several of them.
MPEG actually stands for the motion picture experts group which is the name of the standardizing agency that has come up with all of these formats and they differentiate them simply by numbers. So you have MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4 etcetera. The first one I want to talk about though is a motion JPEG. This is not for the internet. This is for broadcast and some cameras and you will see it quite commonly but it is too large of a file for the internet.
Alright, now MPEG1 was one of the early standards. This is an old format but it is still very common and it is used by a lot of digital cameras and it is one of the first ways to get video on to a CD. So it is considered a very good format and a lot of people still like it but it has been upgraded. Now, MPEG2 is the format that your DVD player or your TiVo machine uses. If you go down the blockbuster video and run a Hollywood movie on a DVD that is going to be an MPEG2 format which means it is a very big format and MPEG2 is not suitable for the internet because of its size but it is very common.
Now MPEG4 is the newest version of conversion software from the motion picture experts group and I personally have to say that MPEG4 is my favorite file format and I say that because it gives excellent quality and a very small file. I converted some the other day to both an MPEG4 and the QuickTime movie just to see the difference, I can’t believe it. It was like 40 megs as an MPEG4 and it was about 180 megs as a QuickTime which is too big for most video sharing site and personally I could not tell the difference looking at them side by side. My eyeballs aren’t good enough to tell the difference. So I really like MPEG4.
And now YouTube accepts .WMV, .AVI, .MOV and MPEG4 and then YouTube will convert your file to an FLV. So you don’t have to convert to an FLV if you are going with YouTube. They’ll do it for you and they use FLV because it is so universal.
Now YouTube claims and I have to agree with then on this that you are going to get the best final product in FLV if you start with an MPEG4. So YouTube recommends that you upload things in the MPEG4 format and then they will convert it. Now one of the best free conversion services that I have found is that www.zamzar.com. I have used them quite a bit. It’s very easy. You email them your file. They convert it for you and then email it back. It’s quite simple and it is free. Zamzar handles I think every file format on the planet. So that’s a great resource and it’s free. You can’t beat that.
There are also many different free conversion software products that you can get, free downloads, they work great. One is divx and the divx networks in the open source community, I have come up with this and you can find it at www.divx.com and they claim that over 200 million downloads have happened of their website for that software so it’s extremely common and very popular.
And other great conversion tool that’s free that I used quite frequently is the MPEG stream clip software which is easy to find. I just googled MPEG stream clip and the site came up as the first one in the organic search results. I have used it a lot to take video and turn it in to DV stream that I can then put in to my editing program and edit off of. I’ve got lots of stuff that is in different formats and I want to edit on it and it needs to be or it’s best if it’s in DV for me to add it. So I used the MPEG stream clip to take it to DV for me and it works like a charm and it works quickly. I love it.
Now a third resource for you is xvid which if you will notice is just divx backwards. Well, that’s because some people got together and said, “You know this divx is not just what we want so we’re going to make something else and we’re going to make the name be backwards and call it xvid”. Anyway it’s very popular. It’s an open source thing and it’s free, and it does a great job. Well there you have it, a brief explanation of digital video file formats. If you like more information on this subject I have lots of articles on my blog at VideoProductionTips.com. Good luck with your video project and thanks for watching. I’m Lorraine Grula.
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